“Hey lesbian, have you ever thought you might actually want to be a man?” – that’s what I might as well have read when I checked my email inbox and found an email from the lesbian and bisexual women’s dating app HER.
What was once widely considered a homophobic cliché is now (supposedly) apropos to say to homosexual women: that they are secretly aspiring men.
There is nothing wrong with female body hair, however, women are constantly told our natural follicles are signs of masculinity and these companies are just continuing this myth that hair equals maleness or at least being less female. I feel for women with naturally high testosterone who are still caught between the mannequin smoothness in glossy magazines and the faux acceptance of the “queer community” who also tell them they are a bit, well, manly.
“Health risks: The biggest concerns associated with testosterone are increased risk for heart attacks and strokes. Testosterone might also:
Increase your red blood cell count which can lead to higher risk of clots
Increase the amount of fat and/or cholesterol in the blood
Increase the chance of diabetes
Harm the liver (although there is recent research that disputes this)
There isn’t a lot of research on the risks of testosterone for HRT so there may be other consequences that we don’t know about yet.
The casual advocacy for non-conforming people and homosexuals to risk death just to disappear or be sexually attractive to people in their subculture really rankles. Are gay people this narcissistically nihilistic or do some clever people out there have a PR savvy way of selling anti-gay eugenics to the victims? Either way, the results are the same, the lesbians disappear and become “heterosexual men”, or they potentially die of avoidable illnesses brought on by taking cross-sex hormones for vanity or as self-medicated solutions to complex forms of depression brought on by trauma.
Doctors treating children and teens with gender dysphoria have opened up about feeling pressured to prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones before non-medical interventions, such as psychotherapy, have been explored.In the first Australian study of its kind, clinicians at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney say the emergence of a “conveyor belt” mentality to treating the condition has forced them to compromise their own ethical standards.The treatment of gender dysphoria in children and adolescents remains contentious. A group of Sydney clinicians is concerned that families are pinning hopes on pills rather than broader psychosocial therapies.
The Sydney doctors, including paediatric endocrinologist Professor Geoffrey Ambler and psychiatrist Dr Kasia Kozlowska, said many children equated gender affirmation with medical intervention and believed their distress “would be completely alleviated if they pursued the pathway of medical treatment”.
Both the patients and their families arrived at the clinic with strongly entrenched beliefs, and the doctors’ efforts to discuss psychological, social or family issues “fell on deaf ears”.
Another challenging aspect of their work was the increased pressure to prescribe cross-sex hormones to children aged 16 and over following a 2017 ruling by the Family Court of Australia.
The ruling essentially removed the requirement for court approval to access stage 2 treatment — cross-sex hormones — and put this responsibility into the hands of doctors.
“In the wake of [this] … some families presented to the clinic with the expectation that a child nearing the age of 16 could attend the gender service, see the mental health team for a one-off consultation, collect a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and move to another service to obtain stage 2 treatment … with no engagement in a therapeutic process.”
Mental health professionals say that under new laws they could lose their licence or even face prison terms for exploring the reasons behind a child’s belief that they were born in the wrong body.
A group of therapists are now calling on ministers to exclude professional treatments of gender dysphoria from the ban, which could be announced as early as next week.
“It is our duty as therapists to explore feelings of gender dysphoria, including any underlying causes, especially when medical transitioning may be irreversible,” said Mr Esses, a children’s counsellor and trainee psychotherapist.
He warned that other countries such as Australia and Canada have already introduced draconian legislation and if the Government follows suit “there is a real risk that those with gender dysphoria, in particular children who need the time and space to think things through, will not get the support they need”.
The Karolinska Hospital in Sweden recently issued a new policy statement regarding treatment of gender dysphoric minors at its pediatric gender services division. This policy, which took effect in April 2021, ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors under age 16. Hormonal intervention for youth ages 16-18 is still allowed, but can only occur in research settings approved by Sweden’s ethics review board, following a thorough informed consent that discloses the significant risks and uncertainties of hormonal interventions, and considers the minor’s maturity level and ability to provide true informed consent. This is a watershed moment. Sweden is the first country to explicitly stop following the Dutch protocol, which allows for administration of puberty blockers at age 12 (and increasingly, as young as 8-9, at the early stage of puberty known as Tanner 2), and cross-sex hormones at the age of 16. It also is the first country to officially deviate from WPATH guidance. WPATH has long positioned itself as the world authority in transgender health. However, in recent months, several countries’ health authorities have conducted their own reviews of the evidence and found the evidence insufficient to justify early medical interventions promoted by WPATH’s guidelines. Sweden’s new policy is consistent with Finland’s recently revised guidelines, which were changed to prioritize psychological interventions and support rather than medical interventions, particularly for youth with no childhood history of gender dysphoria (presently the most common presentation). Significant changes are also underway in the UK, following the High Court ruling that deemed hormonal interventions for minors experimental, and cautioned that minors are rarely able to provide truly informed consent for interventions with such profound life-long consequences. The NHS (National Health Service) has recently suspended the initiation of hormonal interventions to minors under 16. The ruling is currently under appeal, with a hearing scheduled for June 2021. In the US, the debate about the treatment for gender dysphoric minors has become politicized, with some states introducing laws banning the use of various hormonal interventions in minors, while other states perusing legislation to ban psychological treatment modalities for gender dysphoria. As international awareness of the low quality of evidence of the benefits and the potential harm of medical interventions in gender-dysphoric minors grows, the focus is expected to shift to the non-invasive options for ameliorating distress, such as the provision of ethical psychological treatments and support.The original announcement of the new policy obtained by SEGM, as well as the unofficial translation, are below:
Bell, a distinguished psychiatrist and practising psychoanalyst, is the doctor who in 2018 wrote a controversial report about the activities of the gender identity development service (GIDS), a clinic at the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust in north London, where he worked in adult services from 1995 until his retirement earlier this year.
Writing the report was, he says, a matter of conscience. In 2018, 10 GIDS staff brought their worries to him unsolicited, a figure he estimates to be around a third of those then working there. He had no choice but to act and would do the same again.
Among these concerns were the fact that children attending GIDS often seemed to be rehearsed and sometimes did not share their parents’ sense of urgency; that senior staff spoke of “straightforward cases” in terms of children who were to be put on puberty blockers (no case of gender dysphoria, notes Bell, can be said to be straightforward); that some were recommended for treatment after just two appointments and seen only infrequently thereafter; some felt that GIDS employed too many inexperienced (and inexpensive) psychologists; that clinicians who’d spoken of homophobia in the unit were told they had “personal issues”. One told Bell that a child as young as eight had been referred to an endocrinologist for treatment. “I could not go on like this… I could not live with myself given the poor treatment the children were obtaining,” said another.
In September, Bell sent his report to Jenkins and to Paul Burstow, the chairman of the board. For unspecified legal reasons, he says, they forbade him to send it to the council of governors, which oversees the board. “That was when I got myself a lawyer,” says Bell. His lawyer told him that, on the contrary, a failure to send it out might make him culpable in the event of any future legal case taken against the trust.
Bell wrote to staff at GIDS, reminding them of their right, as NHS workers, to speak confidentially. At this point, he says, the trust “went ballistic… they interfered with my emails so I couldn’t write to them again”. The trust’s review delivered its report in February 2019. Initially, Bell was not allowed to see it. He was then given 30 minutes to read its 70 pages (it was later leaked to him in full). “There was still no data. It mentioned intimidation, but no action was [to be] taken. However, it did acknowledge the inappropriate involvement of trans ideology groups in the work of the service.”
In early 2020, procedures were set up for disciplinary action to be taken against Bell. “All the grounds were in connection with my activities as a whistleblower,” he says.
Last January, he retired as planned, only a month after the Keira Bell judgment. He had long believed a case would be brought against the trust, though he thought the most likely scenario was that a former patient would sue for damages (Keira Bell instigated a judicial review). “It was inevitable,” he says. “I warned the trust of this.” But the Keira Bell judgment has done little to alleviate his concerns. Whatever the outcome of the appeal, he believes more questions must be asked, particularly about the rise in the number of girls presenting at the clinic (three-quarters of patients are now girls; the gender balance used to be closer to 50:50). “We do not know why this is happening.” He worries that too much emphasis is placed on gender and not enough on sexuality – “the children are often gay” – and he continues to be anxious about co-morbidities such as anorexia, autism and history of trauma in its patients. “Some of the children are depressed. It’s said that it’s their gender that is the cause of this, but how do we know? And why don’t we try to treat that first?”
But given his politics – Bell describes himself to me as a “Corbyn-supporting Jew” – he has been most shocked by the reluctance of the left to engage with the issues. “They think this is to do with being liberal, rather than with concerns about the care of children. Mermaids and Stonewall [the charities for trans children and LGBTQ+ rights] have made people afraid even of listening to another view.” It surprises him that the left is unwilling to consider the role played by big pharma.
Trans rights are a perfect Trojan horse for predatory men.
What sort of man advocates for the erasure of female sexual boundaries? What sort of man advocates for the removal of child safeguarding procedures? What sort of man advocates for the allowing of males into female safe spaces? What sort of man advocates for policies and legislation which will allow women and girls to be abused, assaulted, harassed, bullied, groomed and gas-lit?
The current prospective study examined the clinical characteristics of children (including adolescents) presenting to a newly established, multidisciplinary Gender Service in New South Wales, Australia, along with the challenges that clinicians faced in providing clinical services to these patients and their families. We found that the clinical characteristics of the children presenting to our service were comparable to those described by other paediatric clinics: a slight preponderance of biological females to males and high levels of distress and comorbid mental health disorders. While previous studies of children have highlighted high rates of abuse, bullying, discrimination, victimization, and family rejection or lack of family support in a general way—often under an umbrella heading of “abuse and victimization experiences” (p326) (Chew et al., 2020)—the results from our study, including the developmental stories told by the children and their families, highlight that many of these experiences have occurred within the family setting itself. That is, our results highlight that many of the ACEs reported by the children and families—family conflict, bullying, parental mental illness, financial stress, maltreatment, and a breakdown of the family system—occur within the family system itself and that the ACEs reflect a long-standing history of relational stress and a chronic disruption of what are normally comfortable and nurturing attachments.
Our study found that the children and families who came to the clinic had clear, preformed expectations: most often, children and families wanted a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to be provided or confirmed, together with referral to endocrinology services to pursue medical treatment of gender dysphoria. . . . It was our impression that these expectations had been shaped by the dominant sociopolitical discourse—the gender affirmative model. It will be interesting to track the expectations of children and families in the years to come as sociopolitical discourses become more varied and diverse and as the voices are heard of both those who have done well and those who not done well via the medical pathway.
Probably few Tasmanian voters going to the polls on May 1 will be aware that their recently dissolved Parliament was responsible for some of the most radical (and incoherent) legislation in the world concerning gender issues. Remarkably, it was passed from opposition by Labor and Greens MPs in 2019. It was supported in the Legislative Assembly by Speaker Sue Hickey, a member of the Liberal Party at that time, who voted against the position of the Government. The changes were also supported in the Legislative Council by a sufficient number of independents.
The legislation was the Justice and Related Legislation (Marriage and Gender Amendments) Act 2019 . It allows a person 16 years or older to register ‘a gender’ which has the effect of amending the birth register, and for parents to do so for a child under 16. The application must be accompanied by a “gender declaration”. This is a statutory declaration in which the person declares that he or she identifies as being of the gender specified and lives, or seeks to live, as a person of that gender.
The problem with the Tasmanian legislation is that it begins from the premise that sex and gender are different, and then concludes that gender is the same as sex once someone fills in a form which is accepted by the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Through an application to an administrator without more, a person can, in essence, change their sex for legal purposes in Tasmanian law.
The intentions of the Parliament to make it possible for transgender people to identify as another gender without sex reassignment surgery could have been fulfilled in a range of ways without embracing unscientific and highly controversial beliefs. People who self-identify as the opposite sex could have been given a gender recognition certificate for the purposes of indicating gender on driving licences or other such official documents. This does not impact upon the rights of anyone else.
Is it so unreasonable for Tasmanians to want their birth certificates to be what they are meant to be – a record of their birth? If 99.98% of the Tasmanian population have no difficulty with their sex or gender, and have not sought to change official records, should policy be dictated by tiny minorities who would like to see sex at birth erased from public records?
The Tasmanian Parliament, recently dissolved, lost its way in a fog of ideological confusion and unscientific beliefs. The new Parliament needs to do better, and to take account of the beliefs of the large majority of people who do not have degrees in gender studies.
