Transgender Documentary on BBC2 Thursday 2100 "Transgender Kids: Who Knows best?"

Datun
I for one really like you repeating your points on various threads. It's like revision/consolidation to me. Your links to pertinent, reliable resources are so useful to refer back to.

Fish
Your posts are so important and heartfelt.
Real, relevant, lived experience.
I love the way you shout out your appreciation for the support you find here!

Prawn how dare you keep educating me!

Personally, I need to learn and absorb and my shitty short term memory lets me down without continual reinforcement.
So if it helps me and informs some lurkers (so important) it's all to the good imo.

I'm sorry to hear what you're going through fish

But I want to thank you for sharing your experience with us. Insights like yours are very helpful to finding permanent solutions to this problem.

I've also said on a couple of threads how much support I've had from all the 'bigoted feminists'

Yeah, I loved that.

An inclusive society does sound great, if you don't look any deeper than the word inclusive I can see why people would think it's a brilliant idea.

I have learned a lot from these threads, I only hope they make other people take notice too.

I know being ignored because I don't fit into the 'transphobic' box isn't really personal, I guess some people want to think they are helping and realising they might be doing more harm than good is a reality they don't want to face, understandable really since they are generally coming from a good place.

There was one poster in particular on the girl guide thread who just had me going WTAF? Her position seemed to be "lady brains... definitely the case, that's what explains trans, but there are no physical differences, none, none at all, if we admit that women are on average smaller, weaker and can't run as fast, then feminism is done for."

So - pink sparkly brains, no threat to women's rights at all (despite well documented history of denying women's access to education and employment because their brains are feeble, despite ample scientific evidence showing that any cognitive differences have tiny d-values - i.e. the statistical distributions look incredibly similar, and in any case are probably nurture rather than nature due to brain plasticity, la la la la la, fingers in ears, can't hear you...). Admitting Usain Bolt runs faster than Flo Jo ever did - the whole edifice of feminism collapses.

Like I said, WTAF?

I honestly thought that girl guide thread must have been trolled by a bunch of activists. It seems inconceivable to me that regular people think like that.

Most of us FishIn... post our random thoughts on MN just for a laugh or to speak our brains. Your posts have the chance to really influence people's thoughts and to make them step outside their preconceptions.

If it works for you, please continue to post while maintaining your anonymity. I learn something new every time I read one of your posts.

I think a lot of them just don't think about it very much and just blindly support online what they think is progressive and right on. It's nothing personal against you.

It's happened more than once. I've been called transphobic and then told them I have a transgender child and they just stop talking to me. I don't fit in with their opinion, they can't cry transphobia at me, they can't call me an evil bigoted feminist, they don't like it because I have experience of living this which 99% of them don't so they just don't talk to me.

I've also said on a couple of threads how much support I've had from all the 'bigoted feminists' and that has been ignored too.

I repeat myself a lot on these threads too. I do end up losing my cool on occasion, but that helps nobody really. I find it frustrating that all the people who think they are helping by shouting transphobia at every turn don't realise the harm they are doing to families like mine.

fish - I hadn't picked up on that on the girl guide thread. Sorry. So even someone very close to the issue, particularly involving children, didn't sway the poster's opinion. All I can say is for every person on the thread there are many more lurking and soaking up the information. It's one of the reasons why I often repeat myself, add links, stay logical and try not to get frustrated or lose it!

Your articulate, rational posts will definitely have had a positive effect.

A close family member gets ECT when in deep depression. It can be effective for some people.

Mmm, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be honest about the risks, or offer only ECT and not try talking therapy first. Or only offer talking therapy if the patient agrees to ECT. Actually I can well imagine all these things happening, they play down side effects of psychiatric drugs already, for example. And psychiatrc patients experience coercion in other ways (eg. the "If you leave the ward we'll section you" de facto sectioning.)

I suspect the general public's expectation of a mental health service that is fit for purpose confuses things. People will assume that all counselling and so on will have already happened. Instead we have a service that is only too keen to redirect or refer on patients, because they are stretched past breaking point. Plus there is still so much prejudice around mental health issues, whereas the trans lobby have drummed home the message EMBRACE TRANS so people can mentally go "Oh, its ok, you're not mental, you're trans! Phew!"

illegitimate When you look at the £90K per annum per child cost for those drugs (net of all the related monitoring costs, counselling & review appts), you could buy quite a lot of psychiatric and psychological support for children...

I assume it's just a different budget, so as mentioned MH services are keen to send patients elsewhere. Perhaps MH services (in theory, although they don't) provide the "general gender ponderings" counselling, then when a decision to transition is almost reached, the person is transferred to the transgender services - which provide counselling around the transition process. No joined up-thinking. (In MH services alone, things are left to deteriorate before they'll do anything, making it more costly in the long run.)

Fish The more I read, the more I wonder what the fuck is happening, why is there such an agenda to push these drugs onto children? Are these kids being used as some sort of experiment?

If children transition it muddies the waters a bit (maybe not in the long run though...). If you have a boy who socially presents as a girl from 6 years old (for eg.) then they will have an awful lot of female socialisation after that. So the "gender is only a social construct" argument, which terrifies the transactivists because it's true, sort of scores an own goal. Because that six year old is now socially a woman inside and out (I would guess without male pattern violence and so on) and the XY does become irrelevent in a way. I suppose like certain intersex individuals.

Erm... need to think about this more but hope that makes some kind of sense.

I suspect the trans agenda and feminist agenda would end up with society in the same place, years down the line, but the trans way takes longer and with many more casualties along the way...

Bambambini This is terrifying. Why aren't the media (Guardian) discussing this?
Because they're funded by the right-wing as a sort of parody leftist newspaper? Maybe. Seems like it.

Poppyred85 my child had 2 lots of NHS general counselling (both an hour a week for 8 weeks) we only got the second lot because we had been through another trauma related to my child's GID neither counsellor specialised in gender related counselling.

I paid for some private counselling.

We had some family therapy through WA that wasn't related to trans issues.

I asked for help from educational psychology, the schools inclusion officer and the guidance counsellor at my child's school but all they have 'helped' do is push my child into fully integrating as the sex they present as by using toilets, changing rooms etc.

We also went to the gender clinic where my child had a couple of sessions talking to a counsellor there 6 months apart, then was referred to the doctor who we saw 3 times over the space of about 8 months and was then offered the blockers. We went back a few weeks after being offered them with the decision it was a no and we're then signed off. We live hours away so we couldn't have had any sort of meaningful help anyway really.

We can't get any more NHS counselling as we've had our lot. I am now able to afford an hours private counselling a week again but am really struggling to find someone who is neutral and not pushing my child down this road.

It sounds like a lot when it's written down I guess but this had been over 5 or 6 years and in reality with all the different types of counselling it's probably been about 30-35 hours in total over that time, which is nothing really. Only the sessions I paid for and the ones at the clinic were specialised in gender counselling.

Currently I'm trying to be neutral and give my child lots of links and things to various blogs and lots on YouTube, however I don't want them to get too embroiled into searching for anything to do with being transgender online so I keep a very close eye on what they are looking at.

It's really a nightmare and everywhere I turn now are people normalising my child's feelings and pushing them down a medicalised road now. It wasn't like that at all when this started.

It was hard to get help then because nobody knew anything about it, but they tried, now it's harder to get any help because children aren't seen as needing any help beyond drugs.

I would honestly rather go back to having to push to be listened to than this.

A close family member gets ECT when in deep depression. It can be effective for some people.

I've posted before about my work, which at one time meant I covered medical controversies.

Most people assume that medicine (and science generally) are driven by evidence, that doctors are level-headed and cautious.

Fact is, medicine is often affected by fashion, particularly when it comes to what you might call "moral panics". I don't know how many posters are old enough to remember the Orkney child abuse scandal? It was the product of a moral panic imported from America, a moral panic that insisted that satanic abuse of children was widespread. However, despite a number of very high profile and exhaustive enquiries and court cases, they never identified a single satanic sexual abuse ring, although they had previously claimed that they were common all over the country.

This belief system was wholeheartedly endorsed by doctors, social workers, and the criminal justice system. The Orkney case happened as follows:

Two British social workers had done a course on satanic abuse and seemingly were mad keen to spot a bunch of satanic parents. Their attention eventually focused on a small group of parents in an isolated community. The excuse was a description one child made at school of a bonfire party, which the social workers redefined as a satanic ritual. The children were all removed in dawn raids. It took many years for the children to be returned, and for the parents to be exonerated. During the course of the satanic child abuse panic, I believe the authorities identified a couple of individual abusers but nothing to justify the hell they put families through both here and in America.

There have been other occasions in which supposed experts acted with very little evidence. The use of ECT, for instance. It was true that ECT occasionally provided remarkable relief from very severe depression but this didn't balance the appalling side effects suffered by a larger group of patients, or acknowledge that the doctors using ECT didn't know why it might work. There was no evidence to support the use of ECT and eventually it went out of fashion.

There have been plenty of other fashions in fields you would expect to operate on evidence alone. And of course there's the inherently fashionable angle on being transgender at all. The level of social contagion is through the roof

Trans, above all things, is new. Unlike homosexuality, which appears in many species of animal, transgenderism appears nowhere else. Socially speaking, trans apologists refer to two spirit people and other groups who have a "third gender" to endorse their claim that being transgender is innate. This comparison doesn't hold water. There's an article here on what two spirit meant. It varied from tribe to tribe, and not all tribes had two spirit people. Either way, there is no evidence that this had anything to do with a belief that men who were assigned to the two spirit group were considered to have transitioned from male to female. In most cases it appears that two spirit men were so classified because they were gay. Societies which have a "third gender" are typically those with extremely rigid gender roles, so not something that anyone with progressive ideas about human rights would want to encourage.

Fish can I ask what kind of professionals have been involved in your child's care? I'm just trying to fathom what kind of doctor would prescribe or encourage the use of these drugs. It's just so completely at odds with the rest of medical care, especially paediatrics. I'm sorry the care you've had has been so unhelpful for both you and your child and I hope you get the support you both need

Datun someone on the girl guide thread the other day was questioning me about my views and then threw out a general bigot and transphobe comment and stopped engaging with me when they realised my child's situation and called everyone else a bigot instead It's not the first time it's happened either.

M0stlyHet thanks, it's not been easy, thankfully there seems to be a little bit of light in the tunnel now. Over the last couple of months when talking about things my child has used the word 'if' instead of 'when' 7 times (not that I've been counting) it might seem like a tiny thing but it's the first time in years there hasn't been certainty about the whole thing so I'll take that.

I finally got around to watching the documentary today on the link kindly provided above:

archive.org/details/BBC-trans-kids

Anything I'd want to say has already been said. However, what strikes me is when we read of the scandals of the past we think "but how could this have go on? why were people willing to turn a blind eye? why did no one listen to the victims? why did the authorities not act?" and it seems incomprehensible. Well, just look around and marvel that it doesn't actually require a conspiracy for a scandal to be ignored while it's in full flow.

Well, that would be what one would hope, Datun, but I'd predict what she'll do is pick up on one of the other gender critical posters, call them a bigot, then completely ignore Fish.

Fish - you must have gone to hell and back.

I don't know how she can call fish a bigot though. Without looking like a complete prat.

Penny to a pound says her response will be that asking about Cologne makes you a racist bigot. I suspect she has a lot of adjectives handy to attach to the word bigot.

Oh she's been asked about that too het!

She won't ignore, WM, not her style. But I reckon she'll say the people posing the questions are transphobic bigots. Personally I can't even be bothered to post, not after her response to the sexual assaults in Cologne last year ("just like Birmingham New Street on a Saturday night" ffs).

Wanking The situation with your dsd is awful too, I really hope it gets resolved quickly.

I find it so upsetting that people are jumping on the band wagon of those with genuine issues to intimidate and hurt girls and women.

I can't believe that in 2017 being inclusive means no mental health help, no sex segregated spaces, and women being pushed back hundreds of years to having no rights again.

£100 on all trans-related questions being ignored. Ala Corbyn

Albadross I don't know if they would have provided additional information after saying yes to the blockers. I'm not sure what happens after you say yes to them.

I'll go and put a question on the Web chat. It will be interesting to see what they say.

If they even know about the process, it's not very well discussed as far as I can tell.

I'm pretty hesitant to talk about it too much but I'm not on social media or anything so can't really be targeted by TAs or anything.