Here’s an interesting story:
A 23-year-old woman who is taking legal action against an NHS gender clinic says she should have been challenged more by medical staff over her decision to transition to a male as a teenager.
A judge gave the go-ahead for a full hearing of the case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.
Lawyers will argue children cannot give informed consent to treatment delaying puberty or helping them to transition.
The Tavistock said it always took a cautious approach to treatment.
[…]
Keira describes being a tomboy as a child. When asked how strongly she felt the need to change her gender identity, she replied that it gradually built up as she found out more about transitioning online.
Then as she went down the medical route, she said “one step led to another”.
She was referred to the Tavistock GIDS clinic at the age of 16. She said after three one-hour-long appointments she was prescribed puberty blockers, which delay the development of signs of puberty, like periods or facial hair.
She felt there wasn’t enough investigation or therapy before she reached that stage.
“I should have been challenged on the proposals or the claims that I was making for myself,” she said. “And I think that would have made a big difference as well. If I was just challenged on the things I was saying.”
Keira should be able to sue and recover damages from this medical company.
A teen girl gets the idea that she is really a boy from spending too much time on the internet and the medical professionals actually concur after only three “one-hour-long appointments.” Did it ever occur to those medical professionals that teens know what to say to be “convincing” thanks to all that internet advice?
The bottom line is that Tavistock needs to pay up for the damages they have caused.
Yet there is an even more disturbing element to this story. It’s found in this line:
Lawyers will argue children cannot give informed consent to treatment delaying puberty or helping them to transition.
If children can give “informed consent” to such radical medical interventions, then how does one insist otherwise when the pedophiles argue that children can consent to sexual behavior? It would seem to me that if you think children can consent to the former, you have committed to acknowledging the same with the latter.
Shadow To Light 
Just think, had this young woman been mutilated in Belgium, rather than in Britain, there would be a far simpler solution than dragging it all out in court — [The Telegraph; Oct 1, 2013] Belgian killed by euthanasia after a botched sex change operation
There’s been another BBC News article, “Children’s gender identity clinic concerns go back 15 years”, about the pronlems at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service:
Poor knowledge, poor practice, and actions taken under too much pressure. (I don’t think we need assume the pressure was ideological: the NHS has little money and time available; drugs are often the quickest and easiest treatment.)
The good news is that the NHS has recently announced there will be a comprehensive review of gender identity services, which should result in a national code of best practice and best evidence based treatment.
> A judge gave the go-ahead for a full hearing of the case against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. Lawyers will argue children cannot give informed consent to treatment delaying puberty or helping them to transition.
I am glad to say that the case has come to court and that the three High Court judges have weighed the evidence and ruled (on the narrow point brought of whether under-18s can properly be considered capable of informed consent to puberty blockers, thence to the ‘cross sex hormones’ that so almost invariably follows that the two stages are not in practice separate but constitute a path of treatment) that:
This quotes the judges’ ‘Overall Conclusion’, Paragraphs 151-2, which is at:
Click to access Bell-v-Tavistock-Judgment.pdf
As I understand the Overall Conclusion, paraphrasing in the light of the whole judgment: children before their 14th birthday do not have sufficient understanding to give informed consent to an experimental and ill-understood treatment — not even to the supposedly innocuous and reversible puberty-blocker first part — because they cannot yet conceive adult life, adult sexuality and the likelihood that when an adult they will probably want to become a parent (but after sex change hormones cannot); those older but not yet 16 are unlikely to have sufficient understanding to consent to treatment — implied is, take it to a court if you disagree; although young people below 16 are presumed in law to have sufficient understanding to consent to treatment, but the clinician had better get a judge’s authorisation before starting or (implied, not stated) the clinician is vulnerable to valid complaint and legal action if the patient subsequently complains they didn’t realise what was entailed.
I might have this paraphrased wrong — legal language is aimed at a legal profession trained to understand it, and this is less clear than I expected it would be — but I’ve given it a go.
*
Something that shocked me was that, far from being an evidence-based course of two treatments, there were no follow-up assessments of the efficacy of the treatment path, no assessment and weighing of its physical and psychological beneficial effects and its physical and psychological ill effects — none long-term, none short-term even; peer-reviewed paper there was as yet none.
Indeed, they hadn’t collected basic statistics to use in an evidence-based approach. For example, they didn’t even know the ages at which patients started treatment (except for the very last year, 2019/20.) Science-led this treatment ain’t.
There was a rather lightweight examination of the psychological effects of the treatment of an early cohort with puberty blockers (which have allegedly reversible effects — the judges disagreed — but no examination of the effects of later treatment with powerful with cross sex hormones which have massive irreversible effects):
Although the two treatments on the treatment path are ‘sold’ for their beneficial psychological effects upon the child or young person, the evidence is of a subjective improvement in mood for some though a decrease for half that number of others (and presumably no change for the remaining 21%); but that objectivetesting found “there was no overall improvement in mood or psychological wellbeing”.
That’s the claimed psychological benefits dismissed. By the science of standardized psychological measures.
Dhay, that’s good news … narrowly speaking 😉
Dhay: “Something that shocked me was that, far from being an evidence-based course of two treatments, there were no follow-up assessments of the efficacy of the treatment path, no assessment and weighing of its physical and psychological beneficial effects and its physical and psychological ill effects — none long-term, none short-term even; peer-reviewed paper there was as yet none.”
Why all that bother, when you can just “euthanize” the failures (as see the link in the first comment to this thread)?
Stop Press: a BBC article, “Tavistock puberty blocker study published after nine years”, tells us the promised peer-reviewed paper has finally been published:
As the three judges correctly surmised and concluded, it’s a near-inevitability that a child starting reversible treatment by puberty blockers will progress to irreversible treatment by cross sex hormones.
The Tavistock Clinic, however, doubled down: one child in the 44 (2%) didn’t progress to cross-sex hormones, so (they claim):
Roll On Floor Laughing! Cynically. 2%?! It’s a sorry state when the judges have a better grasp of the scientific evidence than the clinicians.
So the claims I have seen in articles elsewhere that failure to treat results in a high likelihood of suicide is unproven — the study’s evidence is that that is false.
After the first year of treatment, that is, presumably compared to the initial conditions; but what’s cause and what’s effect? Does starting puberty blockers cause a (temporary) increase in suicidal ideation?
I note that self-harming is startlingly common in teenagers, horribly so. Are trans youngsters more self-harming than the norm? We simply do not know, one way or the other:
What glares at me from this is the astonishing lack of intellectual curiosity and intellectual rigour of the clinicians. Where’s the science? And where — apart from the judges — where is the scientific evaluation based on the evidence, and reasoning therefrom?
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On a lighter note, I initially thought the BBC “Trans teen in legal action over gender clinic wait” article was about a youth who selfishly prioritised his desired sex-change treatment (‘cos he wants it, or perhaps because he’s declaring a threat to suicide) over NHS patients suffering from cancer and other life-threatening conditions — don’t be fooled by the implicit claim, those needing or “needing” trans treatments have no better right to prompt treatment than those suffering from any any other ailment, and the time limit is ‘code of practice’ level guidance, not legally mandatory, and “Sorry, Coronavirus” is a perfect answer to the over-stretched limit in each and every non-emergency case. But on playing the video and finding out what a well-spoken and obviously middle-class youth he is, it became obvious to me that what we have here is, instead, pushy middle-class parents determined to extort the desired treatment for their child — bugger everybody else, however needy — by threat of bad PR.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55015959
That’s about as newsworthy as “dog bites man.”
Oops, the paper itself is at:
Click to access 2020.12.01.20241653v1.full.pdf
“… that what we have here is, instead, pushy middle-class parents …”
You’re among friends: you can be blunt. You mean pushy mother (and milk-sop father … if there even is one), don’t you?
Trans-activists like to give the impression that what trans-people really, really, really want is to be recognised — officially, legally recognised — as the gender they now identify as.
But do they? In Britain the current system for getting legal recognition of the gender a trans-person now identifies as, is:
A two year waiting period (from initial application);
a review by or appearance before a specialist panel;
a fee of £140 ($195.)
The fee’s just been cut to £5, reports the Guardian:
Interestingly and revealingly, the women and equalities minister, Liz Truss said:
Really! £140 is earned in just two days — 16.06 hours — by those on the National Minimum Wage of £8.72/hour; for most people, trans-people included, earning more than the minimum wage, £140 represents an even tinier proportion of their annual income.
What does it say about the keenness of trans-people to be recognised as their self-identified gender when fully a third of trans-people are deterred from seeking that legal recognition by the peanuts cost, two days’ earnings, a paltry £140 ($195.)
Trans-people really, really, really want to be recognised as the gender they now identify as? As Shakespeare nearly put it, that’s condemned by faint interest.
Well, duh!
Since it’s “misogynistic” to expect that Persons Who Menstruate ™ can and should purchase their own [X] Sanitary Products, then *clearly* it’s “transphobic” to expect that Persons Who Mutilate ™ can and should purchase their own “gender recognition certificates”.
Or, more succinctly, these people don’t want to pay for anything. They perform as if they have a delusional sense of entitlement, but I’m starting to suspect that they actually have a crippling (and not unfounded) fear of being made to rely on their own skills and merits.
Generation Participation Trophy comes of age.