The Brits issue some sanity on underage transgender transition
I hope the US follows suit. But here’s the new British position, which is a step in the right direction:
The United Kingdom’s National Health Service now says that most children claiming to be transgender may be going through a “transient phase.”
The NHS plans to begin restricting gender-affirming treatment of minors who claim to be transgender, according to a report in The Telegraph.
Restrictions will be placed on puberty blockers, and medical doctors — not therapists — will be expected to lead the provision of transgender services.
I’m not sure why doctors taking the lead would matter. Both therapists and doctors have become predominantly supportive of children’s medical transition these days, as far as I can tell. Or at least it has become very easy to find such doctors and such therapists.
As far as social – not medical – transition goes, there’s this:
The provided NHS plans go on to state that social transitioning — the changing of one’s name and appearance to be in line with self-perception — should only be considered when the young person is experiencing “clinically significant distress.”
Additionally, the child must be able “to fully comprehend the implications of affirming a social transition.”
No child is able to “fully comprehend” such a thing. I don’t think most children even partly comprehend it. For that matter, do adults? But adults are responsible for their own decisions and can give consent. Children are not and cannot.
Also, virtually all of these children are experiencing “clinically significant distress.” That distress is interpreted by the child as a need for transition. But it often masks distress emanating from other things such as fear of puberty, social contagion, abuse, loneliness, placement on the autism spectrum, family dysfunction, and generalized depression and/or anxiety. It used to be the job of therapists to sort this out, but that has been discouraged and self-diagnosis by children has been encouraged in recent years, and doctors and therapists have been instructed to affirm that self-diagnosis by the child.
This is certainly a good step, although there is little reason to be optimistic about Sunak (despite the fact that excellent indeed is his frank discussion of the need not to be distracted by “political correctness” in the prosecuting of Britain’s vile Muslim rape gangs, operating for decades in dozens of cities), while, in this country, the senile buffoon (or his handlers) considered it a matter of some importance to convene a meeting at the WH with the disturbed and disturbing Dylan Mulvaney, a TikToker/activist (Ulta Beauty) whose considerable fame derives from acting like a silly adolescent girl.
Couple this with the recent apology and payout to the street evangelist and you might see a little flicker of life left in the dying Empire.
I’m still betting against a UK “revival,” but I would love to be wrong.
I think it bizarre that otherwise uncharacterized “therapists” should be prescribing ANY drug, especially in the context of putative gender dysphoria in children.
Cicero (5:35 pm), good to see you posting here again. Be well! (That’s an order.)
M J R
Would that debased Old Blighty might years ago have summoned such spine in stopping subhuman Pakistani grooming gangs ruining the lives of thousands of its vulnerable young girls. A national shame that never can be atoned for, never erased.
Discussion at home on who, or what, is driving this craze.
I mentioned parents, especially mothers, who want “little girls”. That caused shock. I don’t know how accurate it is, but there have been apocryphal reports for a long time of some mothers dressing their little boys in “girly” fashions, and encouraging feminine activities to satisfy their own psychological needs. Now, the next step is socially acceptable, and apparently legal.
Is the reverse true? Do some fathers support the opposite transition in hopes that their little girl will happily help them field dress a deer? Or come home with a black eye and broken nose after the good fight against the class bully? Color me biased; but I suspect that fathers play the same role in this matter as they do in the “woman’s right to choose”.
I have no answer. I do suspect that it is easier for a mother to indoctrinate a young boy into loving dolls, and pretty clothes, than for a father to convince the average girl to field dress a deer; no matter how earge she is to please him. Some may disagree.
Then, of course, there are teachers and school administrators. Why? I have no clue as to what drives them.
But. I also speculated about social media; and I think this is a serious factor among older adolescents. Has it become the “cool” thing, kind of like peroxiding your hair back in the day? Or more recently, the Goth look? Or on a more sinister level, experimenting with drugs? We have learned to our chagrin that social media can drive destructive behavior among the immature, Well, not just among the immature.
Primitive societies practiced child mutilation. It seems that we are hell bent on reverting to a more primitive society. There are other practical indicators of this. The rush to abandon technologies that have served to civilize us is one. I can imagine de facto tribalism to compete for scarce resources in the world that follows universal dependence on renewable energy, and other counterproductive initiatives. In preparation for the future, our schools and universities should offer classes in “the practical aspects of wringing a chicken’s neck, plucking and cleaning (lab required) “. Such skills, and the stomach to employ them, may once again be necessary for the broader population as we abandon the conveniences that society has provided. Courses on “organizing to defend the tribal compound” might also be appropriate.
One point in favor of the NHS, and probably a significant one, is that all these doctors are on salary. I suspect the medical/hospital support for this nonsense is financial. Covid also provided another incentive for misbehavior as the Covid diagnosis was very lucrative for hospitals. Medical ethics is a lost cause, I fear.
@ Mike K > “I suspect the medical/hospital support for this nonsense is financial”
That’s directed toward the US, I deduce, and have seen several stories on the web that support that supposition.
As for the NHS – if they have been doing transgender mutilations, that almost certainly has been costing them money that isn’t paid for by patients or insurance companies, and thus have a significant incentive to reduce rather than increase the procedures.
Not that I’m complaining.
TommyJay shared this link on the Open Thread, and the essay by Rabbi Barclay is very much worth reading. Everyone, especially medical and educational institutions and personnel, should sincerely consider his analysis and recommendations.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/why_gender_confusion_is_increasing_and_what_can_be_done.html
All of these insane leftist dystopian wet dreams share two results
Less breeding
More dying
Why doctors? Because when affirming interventions go wrong, or when a transitioners begin thinking they made a horrible mistake, it’s the doctors who have to pick up the pieces. Therapists have been trained to affirm gender dysphoria, essentially to think of patients as on a train track, with the only question being how far down the transition track they should go. Mental health care associations and professional groups have decided that questioning root causes, external pressures, trauma (often sexual trauma), or other mental health issues is wrong, and that only pro-transition therapy should be given. So when a trans person starts reaching for detransitioning, mental health practitioners turn their backs. It’s the physicians who then are left standing by the patient.
I have never commented here before, but I am replying to Oldflyer. My great niece is definitely a womanly young woman, but she can and has field dressed a deer. My nephew enjoys hunting with his oldest daughter. Emphasize the final word there when you read it. He would have liked a son, but he would never want one of his daughters to be anything else, especially a medically made anything else. As a girl in those unenlightened fifties, I helped my grandfather clean doves. They called me a tomboy because of my interests, but I never wanted to be a real boy.
@oldflyer
“Discussion at home on who, or what, is driving this craze.
I mentioned parents, especially mothers, who want “little girls”. That caused shock. I don’t know how accurate it is, but there have been apocryphal reports for a long time of some mothers dressing their little boys in “girly” fashions, and encouraging feminine activities to satisfy their own psychological needs. Now, the next step is socially acceptable, and apparently legal.”
It’s so insane to me, and I say this as someone who wanted a daughter for as long as I wanted children. I always had a “fear” that I would go on to have, like, 9 sons and no daughters. And my first born WAS a son, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to find out that my second child was a daughter. However, she was sadly stillborn at full-term. Believe me, my desperation for a living daughter only intensified. It would be 3.5 years before I would have another child (long story there), and while she was thankfully a girl, there is still NO WAY I could fathom having another son only to “feminize” him and possibly even push on the transgender path. He would always still be a boy in girl face, and I can’t understand these mothers who would sacrifice their own sons for a fake daughter, no matter how badly they wanted a little girl.
I’m not saying that’s not what’s driving some of these MtF transitions – I’ve seen some of these mothers and I totally believe there is some transhausen by proxy going on. I just…can’t wrap my head around it.
FTA: No child is able to “fully comprehend” such a thing. I don’t think most children even partly comprehend it. For that matter, do adults? But adults are responsible for their own decisions and can give consent. Children are not and cannot.
Most adults cannot even partly comprehend the consequences of actions as common and tragic as marital infidelity. Does any sane adult believe that children can grasp the consequences of something as momentous and irreversible as genital mutilation?
What is driving this craze?
Humans have an innate desire to have attention paid to them.
This is a way to say, “Hey, look at me!”
It has the advantage of being easy- no effort involved in “identifying” as whatever you choose, unlike graduating at the top of the class, writing a great book, catching the game-winning pass, or building something that withstands the test of time.
To make it easier, our dysfunctional culture worships the victim.
Sex is what you are. “Gender” has become what you think you are. If what you are =/= what you think you are, you are delusional.
Delusion is a mental disorder, and delusional people are “victims” of society’s “ableism.”
Posting comments on blogs is also a way of saying, “Hey, look at me!” but it has the advantage of not involving mental or physical mutilation.
Transgenderism is what happens when a mental illness is transformed into a civil rights movement. Suddenly everyone is required by law to go along with these crazy ideas.
When schizophrenia is declared a civil right will we all be required to acknowledge that we too hear the voices? Will the military be forced to accept schizophrenics into the submarine service?
NS:
The vast majority of transitions are female-to-male.
And the vast majority of parents are devastated.
NS, I’m so sorry for your loss.
I can’t speak to what drives adults, but as for the children, is it any surprise that a very young adolescent would be aghast at the changes in his or her body, feel “wrong” in it, imagine that if it could only somehow be changed and improved, everything would be better? A young girl, for instance, goes from having a free unselfconscious neutral body to, suddenly, a body that bulges and leaks and looks all wrong, no matter what she does — or looks just fine, which brings its own set of problems. She’s confronted with having periods every month for the next 40 years. She can’t walk alone at night any more, in fact can’t feel quite safe anyplace alone, and is told by all the adults who are supposedly concerned for her welfare that every boy is a potential rapist and that she’s going to be Oppressed forever by the Patriarchy because she’s female, etc. etc. By contrast, being a boy might seem so free and strong and safe. Why wouldn’t she maybe wish sometimes that she didn’t have to be a girl?
((Don’t read too much into this — I was a girl who was always very glad to be a girl, whether or not it was always fun — but I can readily understand the confusion of any child of either gender who has suddenly lost the freedom of childhood for all the complications and restrictions of impending adulthood, and will never have that childhood body back again that used to feel so free and homey.)
I am certain boys have their own set of just as awful, or in some ways worse, losses, fears and embarrassments. I don’t mean to suggest that girls are in some way particularly oppressed — it’s just that I was a girl once so I understand girlhood a little better than boyhood. But, girl or boy, it’s easy to imagine feeling lost and frightened when your body and almost everything about the rest of your life abruptly changes in the space of a year or two. I can see why a child might look for some answer that would make it all okay again — especially if he or she is already vulnerable because of autism, depression, anxiety or the other ills that today’s teens seem to suffer too often. And these days, there’s social media right there, all ready to pull you into its vortex.
So I have no trouble understanding why young people are prey to the adult forces that want to use and exploit them. Why on earth adults want to do that is another question that I can’t begin to answer. But I empathize with the poor lost scared kids.
@ NS > “I totally believe there is some transhausen by proxy going on”
I totally agree with you — and admire the neologism!
Well, it was “ne0” to me, but apparently showed up online as early as 2020, and has an established “literature” in the web searches.
This example raised some good points about the abusive nature of pushing children into surgical mutilation and psychological dysphoria, and also some cautions about assuming that all, or even many, parents exhibit the syndrome.
She lays more blame on the social milieu that encourages (almost mandates) transitioning.
https://loreleihatpin.substack.com/p/transhausen-by-proxy-a-few-thoughts