What adults to children another – as that bloke said about millstones and the briny deep.
The only NHS gender clinic for children is risking a “live experiment” by sending hundreds for life-changing medical intervention without sufficient evidence of its long-term effects, experts have warned.
The Times has spoken to five clinicians who resigned from the service because of concerns over the treatment of vulnerable children who come to the clinic presenting as transgender.
They believe that some gay children struggling with their sexuality are being wrongly diagnosed as “transgender” by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic.
All five former staff were responsible for deciding which trans-identifying youngsters should be given hormone blockers to halt their sexual development. The vast majority of those who begin blockers go on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach 16.
The NHS specialists warned that vulnerable children and teenagers had been sent down the path towards transition before experts had time to assess the causes of their gender confusion.
Given everything we know about human beings and fads and fashions who doesn’t think that there will be some swept up in it?
And congrats to The Times for taking the subject on as a major campaign.
first do no harm.
Given everything we know about human beings and fads and fashions who doesn’t think that there will be some swept up in it
Yarp. We’ve been here before, with anorexia (except the NHS didn’t give liposuction to emaciated 14 year old girls who thought they were fat).
At the other end of the age spectrum, the NHS has released guidelines on treatment for elderly transgenders with dementia, which raises the horrifying question of how are nurses supposed to take care of confused geriatrics with a surgical wound that needs regular dilation to stop it from healing up. If the patient forgets he’s meant to be a lady and gets angry or violent – what are carers meant to do?
But it’s much worse when doctors deliberately mutilate kids based on gender pseudoscience. Tranny activists like to point to the vanishingly tiny percentage of people who are born intersex or whatever to justify their cause, but surely it suggests the opposite?
We know that a very small number of people are born with genital birth defects, or other types of disability. We also know that our genes didn’t evolve to kill us or make us sterile, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.
So it makes no scientific sense to claim significant numbers of children were born in the “wrong” body. By definition, that’s impossible.
Tranny activists like to point to the vanishingly tiny percentage of people who are born intersex or whatever to justify their cause, but surely it suggests the opposite?
As I think you’ve mentioned before, there’s no point in arguing with nutters.
MC – I know. Trouble is, the NHS has gorn mad too. As have the police.
Did you see Graham Linehan (the annoyingly #woke Irish guy who wrote Father Ted) was harassed by cops for disagreeing with trannies on Twitter?
This is an ecumenical matter.
If children present with gender confusion, assume they are mentally ill (as most TGs are) and treat accordingly. Irreversible treatments are for consenting adults only.
The NHS will almost inevitably be sued in future for inflicting irreversible treatments on children.
This is an attempt to enshrine Marxist subjectivist evil into law Steve. The trannies are just the excuse–as minorities always have been to the scum of the left. It does not matter if it is 2+2=5 or men=women–the crucial bit is “if socialism tells you they do”. Backed up by the stench of the jailhouse.
“The NHS will almost inevitably be sued in future for inflicting irreversible treatments on children.”
Win or lose it will be taxpayers money not from the pricks who did the deeds.
The Sunday Times reported that transgender toolkits are being distributed to schools. I didn’t get to the end of the article but I think this is a bad idea. Teachers are not trained surgeons and malpractice suits could bankrupt the system.
I suppose we’ll have to accept that these will become standard in all armed forces first aid kits though.
Theo: “The NHS will almost inevitably be sued in future…”
But it won’t care, because it’ll be the taxpayer who really forks out.
“The NHS will almost inevitably be sued in future for inflicting irreversible treatments on children.”
Yeah. Probably. Puberty is irreversible. Inflicting it on a child who it turns out is transgender, for reasons rooted in delusion, mental illness, and iron age religious insanity, will result in a difficult legal dilemma. Are parents and the nutty transphobic doctors who refused treatment to be held responsible for the irreversible damage they’ve done? Or does their insanity excuse them legal responsibility? Can they plead insanity, and seek treatment?
It’s happened before. Don’t think it can’t happen to you.
“We know that a very small number of people are born with genital birth defects, or other types of disability. We also know that our genes didn’t evolve to kill us or make us sterile, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”
Genes follow the same principle every manufacturing process does. Quality control has a high cost, and the nearer you try to get to perfection the higher the price you have to pay. So any manufacturing process is subject to a trade-off. It only has to be “good enough”. The difference in reproduction rate between 99% and 99.9% is minuscule (under 1%) compared to the huge costs of reducing the error rate by another factor of 10.
Nature is and always has been about being “good enough” rather than perfect.
Your argument has been used in the past to claim that homosexuality doesn’t make evolutionary sense, either. But homosexuals exist, and in large numbers, too.
It’s obvious that people’s sexual desire for the opposite sex is hard-wired into the brain. It’s obvious that somewhere there is a brain module that implements this function. It’s obvious that if your brain is wired with the ‘wrong’ module, you’ll wind up being sexually attracted to your own sex. It’s obvious (now that they don’t have to hide from authoritarian religious sickos) that around 2-6% of the population are gay (depending on the survey).
And now that everyone can see this, it’s obvious to everyone that brain wiring is more varied than previously thought, and that the simplistic binary view was too rigid and did immense harm to millions of people for thousands of years for no good reason whatsoever. But now that we know better, we can see that the problem wasn’t the homosexuals and others with variations on the standard wiring who were telling the truth, but the religious sickos who were spreading lies and delusions, and terrorising anyone who resisted their decrees.
Past generations had the excuse of ignorance for their evil. The current generation, on the other hand…
Are mass resignations an effective means of effecting change, or do they just leave the field open for the nutters?
For example, when a politician resigns on a matter of principle, he (rarely a she) is swiftly replaced by a politician without principles. When the CoE lost members due to the ordination of women, it didn’t skip a beat in continuing to advance other liberal causes.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6896091/Hospital-apologises-transgender-woman-dressed-Mrs-Claus-mistaken-man.html
We’re all mad whilst NiV and pouty Chantelle are sane. I’m not sure where Pippa / Philip lies on the barking spectrum. I doubt NiV will be inclined to tell us.
Andrew –
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
“It’s obvious that people’s sexual desire for the opposite sex is hard-wired into the brain.”
Stop right there. It’s far from obvious. Sexual desire is. How you choose to express it is choice
NiV
The difference is that now it’s generally accepted that it’s a bad idea to try to force someone who is gay to be straight and basically leave people as they are.
With transgender we have leapt headlong into trying to change male to female or vice versa based on little to no evidence that it is ultimately of benefit. Even worse we are inflicting massive changes on children who aren’t old enough to make such decisions for themselves and who haven’t completed their sexual development which may sort out any problems naturally anyway.
The two instances are being treated completely differently.
They’re *CHILDREN*. Children shouldn’t be having *ANY* gender/sex identity, that’s something of the *ADULT* world. Leave it until they become adults, and can make adult choices to mutilate their own body and/or persue their sexual attractions..
“Leave it until they become adults, and can make adult choices to mutilate their own body and/or persue their sexual attractions..”
While it is right that adults must leave children alone, and that children are not ready to make decisions with permanent effect; children might have their own perceptions.
When I was in 1st form, our maths teacher was an attractive young woman with long hair and a short skirt (this was long ago, when fashion was more tyrannical than it is now.).
One day she dropped a piece of chalk and almost bent over to retrieve it, changing her mind at the very last moment. Puberty descended on me like a hammer, and I have known since that moment that I was a heterosexual nerd.
Puberty is irreversible. Inflicting it on a child who it turns out is transgender, for reasons rooted in delusion, mental illness, and iron age religious insanity, will result in a difficult legal dilemma. Are parents and the nutty transphobic doctors who refused treatment to be held responsible for the irreversible damage they’ve done?
You come out with some shite, but this is a whole new level.
No one forces anyone to go through puberty. It is a natural process, as is aging, or breathing.
You can’t inflict puberty any more than grey hair, baldness or wrinkles.
Your argument has been used in the past to claim that homosexuality doesn’t make evolutionary sense, either. But homosexuals exist, and in large numbers, too.
This is an interesting point (albeit in service of a lunatic argument).
Homosexuality doesn’t make any obvious sense from an evolutionary point of view. I’ve seen some evo psych types try to explain it in terms of supporting the broader group, but I’m not convinced they’ve proven their case yet.
My own guess is that it might have something to do with nerds. A small percentage of men are awkward nerds, and they produce a very large percentage of the technological advances that benefit us all. A small percentage are homosexual, and they produce a very large percentage of the cultural artifacts that benefit us all. From a selfish gene perspective, being a spotty nerd or a flamboyant bum pirate are both sub-optimal, yet these traits persist.
The ONS says 1.5% of the population are homosexual. We have thousands of years of history documenting the existence of homosexual behaviours, and thousands of years of crowdsourced wisdom from our ancestors (who you categorise as “authoritarian religious sickos”) on how to regulate the awesome, destructive power of human sexuality.
We can’t say the same thing about transgenderism, which is an entirely modern phenomenon. For sure, we can mention the extreme perversions of Elagabalus, and some Red Injun tribes permitted failed men to live as basically honorary women (but nobody thought they were actually women).
That’s pretty much it. Until roughly five minutes ago, nobody outside an insane asylum for the criminally mental, or a university gender studies department (but I repeat myself) thought that men could be women or women could be men.
We do, however, have a long an inglorious history of popular delusions and the madness of – well, not crowds, as Mackay sniffily put it, but cultural elites. The proletarian or agrarian masses are rarely the progenitors of insane trends.
It’s the people who consider themselves to be educated sophisticates who are most likely to succumb to the intellectual equivalent of HIV – as the history of toxic memes like Communism, Feminism or Diversity demonstrates.
If I understand NiV right then being gay or being transgender are both a form of mental condition. (I deliberately don’t use mental illness as that implies something is wrong). So…your body is A but your sexual desire or desire to be are B. In the case of homosexuality the answer is simple – just sow your oats where you want and be happy about it. I don’t think however that in the case of gender dysmorphia that surgery to make you a bit more like B is a winning strategy. Everyone can tell in a nanosecond that you are still actually A. Getting a willing sexual partner may be hard to impossible. And if you burn your boats and go nadsnipping – well you’re kind of stuck. Surely some form of mental health approach in the first instance might be better. Certainly so if the putative nadsnipper is only a child.
Is it any wonder that such a shockingly high percentage of trannies try to commit suicide? They’re already fucked up mentally (by definition). Fucking them up physically into the bargain, especially pre-puberty, doesn’t seem to add to the chances of them emerging balanced and happy.
“1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.”
The problem there is in having authoritarian institutions to kill and gut. They’re not changing their essential nature, only their target.
“Stop right there. It’s far from obvious. Sexual desire is. How you choose to express it is choice”
Umm. You think you *chose* to be heterosexual? You could have decided to be homosexual, and find men attractive?
“With transgender we have leapt headlong into trying to change male to female or vice versa based on little to no evidence that it is ultimately of benefit.”
There’s plenty of evidence that it’s of benefit. The medical profession don’t do anything without it! You’re just ignoring it, or rejecting it, or ignorant of it.
And the problems are caused by forcing people to act against their nature. Some people have minds of a different sex to their bodies. We can’t rewire the brain. Changing the body to match is currently the best we can do.
“Even worse we are inflicting massive changes on children who aren’t old enough to make such decisions for themselves and who haven’t completed their sexual development which may sort out any problems naturally anyway.”
They don’t make such decisions for themselves – they get advice from adults. Their parents, their doctors, their therapists. Not from random nutters on the internet with a strong opinion who think their mad views should hold sway over the views of the child’s family and doctors. You are not these kids parents. What’s it got to do with you?
And the problem is that the choice *not* to intervene medically is a decision too, with irreversible and potentially horribly damaging consequences as well. What if you let sexual development proceed and you turn out to have been wrong? The dysphoria doesn’t go away? Will you pay compensation for the damage your mistake has done to somebody else’s life? Or will you shrug, and walk away, and pretend their suffering is somehow not your fault?
“No one forces anyone to go through puberty. It is a natural process, as is aging, or breathing.”
So is bleeding to death, or dying of cancer. The choice *not* to treat someone medically is a decision too. The choice to *forbid* treatment, even when the patient asks for it, even when there are doctors willing to supply it, is to impose your own opinions on somebody else’s autonomy over their own body.
If you think you have the right to dictate to others what they may do with their own body, what is to stop anyone doing the same and dictating to you?
“I don’t think however that in the case of gender dysmorphia that surgery to make you a bit more like B is a winning strategy. Everyone can tell in a nanosecond that you are still actually A.”
It depends on whether you take action before or after puberty. Intervene before puberty, and it’s actually quite difficult to tell. Intervene after puberty, and it’s very difficult to fix the damage.
Hence the desire to start treatment early.
“Surely some form of mental health approach in the first instance might be better.”
If you mean to change their mind, then it’s been tried and it doesn’t work. You could no more persuade someone they’re mentally male by talking at them than you could persuade them to be gay, or like the taste of parsnips by talking at them.
If you mean to find strategies for coping mentally, then yes, they already do that.
“Is it any wonder that such a shockingly high percentage of trannies try to commit suicide?”
The high suicide rate is mostly because of the way society treats them, not because of the condition itself. The suicide rate drops considerably when friends and family are supportive. And the feelings of dysphoria leading to suicide are more often relieved by surgery.
“A small percentage are homosexual, and they produce a very large percentage of the cultural artifacts that benefit us all.”
I don’t find this a convincing argument because periods of technological progress are quite rare in human history. And we’ve only now got a really consistent patch of it because we’ve solved, in the technological world at least, all the scarcity problems that keep people in the fields elsewhere, and haven’t gone and blown everyone and everything up for a good 70+ years.
If we’ve been around in modern form for 15,000 generations (give or take, between friends), it took about 14,700 generations for the technological vanguard to come up with a written language, which is probably the first real inflection point on the way to a technological society*.
It’s been, at best, fits and starts since then, and didn’t properly get going in Europe until the Roman era. I can’t bring myself to believe that a bunch of fabulous stone-age beleathered queens made a sufficiently greater contribution to the development of the shape of the axe head than their heterosexual counterparts who, unlike the queers, had to produce food for females and children in order to get sex, for this to be a selectable trait.
*: Tangentially this is also why I don’t buy the “Africans are inherently inferior” hypothesis – since white people are not even a blink of the evolutionary eye ahead when you look at it this way. Middle-easterners just got there first, for a whole mixture of speculative and unknowable reasons.
“Umm. You think you *chose* to be heterosexual? You could have decided to be homosexual, and find men attractive?”
Yep. Since sexual pleasure, independent of the reproductive function, can be enjoyed with either sex, the optimum sexuality is obviously bi-sex. In practise, seems to be more popular with women than men. It’s heterosexuality & homosexuality are the aberrants on the sexuality choice spectrum. But there’s other factors involved. Reproductive pair bonding reinforces heterosexuality in most cultures. Exclusive homosexuality is a reproductive dead end. but is just about viable if you have the rest of the culture to do your breeding for you.
It’s difficult to see where transgender fits into this. It doesn’t seem to be for sexual pleasure because the above options cater for this. Role playing the opposite sex could be fun for the fun minded but taking it seriously’s something else entirely. Sounds like the difference between someone who enjoys a pint & an alcoholic. Which is also a matter of choice.
NIV, since you know this stuff, come and show us some reliable figures from a reliable source.
1: 2018 (or most recent available year) suicide rate as a proportion of people who had transitioned.
2: Suicide rate in people who wanted to transition in any year before the surgery became possible. Let me suggest 1898 for reference. I was going to say go back 100 years (so just before people were thinking about doing this) but that year’s death statistics are obviously gonna be a bit weird.
You can (rather, should) correct for any difference in the underlying suicide rate in the two chosen years.
“Role playing the opposite sex could be fun for the fun minded”
BiS, I am given to understand that you have some expertise in the field of sexual recreation. Can you enlighten us as to how you might go about this? OK, I guess ladies can use strap-ons and such, but gents?
The question is purely academic, you’ll understand.
If you mean to change their mind, then it’s been tried and it doesn’t work.
They change their own minds.
Pippa / Philip does every other day or so.
BiG – explain Elton John then.
I raise you 1 Mick Jagger.
Nota Benny:
for this to be a selectable trait
This is the thing, homosexuality would seem to be the opposite of an inherited trait, gays are more likely to self-select out of the gene pool and into the disco-sauna.
But gays have always been with us, or at least since written records began in antiquity. So why not Queens of the Stone Age?
“Middle-easterners just got there first, for a whole mixture of speculative and unknowable reasons”
That’s not completely true, is BiG? Cultures in Central & South America got to much the same point over the same period completely independently, give or take a thousand or so years.
We know gays have been with us a long time, otherwise there wouldn’t be biblical injunctions against gay sex.
I’m not arguing there were no queens of the stone age, I’m arguing that the supposed freeing up of gay resources to invent a shinier smartphone was not relevant, or at least not relevant to enough of human history for this to account for much selective pressure in favour of homosexuality.
bis, yes, it’s true (I’m not an anthropologist and don’t know this stuff thoroughly). The point is that “give or take a thousand or so years” is utterly meaningless on evolutionary timescales.
“Surely some form of mental health approach in the first instance might be better.”
If you mean to change their mind, then it’s been tried and it doesn’t work. You could no more persuade someone they’re mentally male by talking at them than you could persuade them to be gay, or like the taste of parsnips by talking at them.
No more psychotherapy, then. (That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, in my view, but I’m not sure that’s what was intended.)
I happen to know a (very) sort-of practitioner working with some of these kids. Anyone who hears the bollocks they talk: “they (the kids) know what they want”, will agree with Theo’s prediction of an expensive lawsuit shitstorm in15 years.
“I guess ladies can use strap-ons and such, but gents? ”
I would imagine the answer to that is probably in the question.
I was worried you might say that.
Trying bringing up Rapid Onset Tranagender Syndrome and your treated as if you are Hitler.
The problem is that a lot of the doctors are on the kids side and happy to let them decide to start treatment, the most extreme case I’ve seen was a month from coming out the child was on puberty suppressing treatment.
As a parent who has gone through this I have to say the system is on the child’s side and many professionals are happy to push ahead with treatment, having a supportive GP is a godsend
My ten year-old, with a perfectly straight face and the uttermost sincerity, likes honey on Wednesday.
By Sunday, honey is the devil’s work.
Why is there a “Gender Identity Development Service”? Is this really a government thing?
Don’t worry, May’s new internet laws will outlaw all this as “hateful content” and we’ll all be saved.
No wait, the article exposing it will be outlawed as “hateful content” and “fake news”, sorry.
Enjoy being informed, even as poorly informed as the current media allows us at the moment. That’s all going to change soon.
Re perpetuation of genes for male homosexuality I remember a suggestion that there might be an advantage either genetic or in terms of assistance (eg food, protection) to siblings especially sisters in successfully raising the next generation and thus perpetuating the genes. In don’t know how robust the data is but the help of gay friends has been invaluable to my family.
As to tranniedom, cross dressing is a part of the culture usually for entertainment or satire or the mechanism of the plot eg As You Like It, GOK why we should suddenly take it seriously especially when adopters look like pantodames rather than androgynes.
I am surprised there is not more outrage from the LG community that trannies are pursuading children to doubt their gender rather than their sexual orientation.
Back to the homosexuality as selectable trait, there is enough data to convince me that there is a heritable component. You don’t need to identify genetic loci to do that, pedigrees are sufficient. Unfortunately, you can come up with an evolutionary Just So story to explain anything.
As always, it’s a definitional problem. Who is gay? Is Michael Portillo gay? The gay lobby would certainly claim so. What about the so-inclined who don’t express the trait by having gay sex? I have gay friends who have children with their ex-wives. I’m also the only heterosexual of several siblings. To what extent is it memetic or environmental?
I’ve heard that it could be a gene that makes men more likely to be gay but the same gene in women makes them a lot more likely to have lots of children (or at least more likely to raise them well) so it balances out and doesn’t die off. Or something like that. Can’t exactly remember, it was some time ago I read it.
Dongguan John- that’ll do it. it’d explain a lot. Male carriers would also have heterosexually reproduced too, so the trade off could be quite subtle to still be pervasive.
It could be something like that. But it’s also a Just So story.
Yeah I think it is, although I’m sure I remember some research be referenced.
It’s interesting thinking of mechanisms where a ‘gay gene’ could work because at first it seems counterintuitive. A fun thought experiment.