Times Scotland article - 16 and 17 year olds referred for surgery

On the whole, "going along with the rest of your tribe" is quite a good evolutionary strategy.

Not such a good evolutionary strategy when going along with the rest of your tribe involves sterilisation.

A sort of mass hysteria that people are just not applying any critical thought.

Well, people don't normally apply critical thought, because they don't have to.

On the whole, "going along with the rest of your tribe" is quite a good evolutionary strategy.

But it's certainly fascinating to watch how far you can push nonsense relying on that basic behaviour.

OldCrone
Helen Minnis, the author of that article and mother of the child involved, who apparently immediately accepted that her child 'is transgender' (and that the only possible treatment was a double mastectomy ASAP), is the head of a research group at Glasgow University looking at treatments for autism

How on earth can someone look at autism and think about "treatments", attempt to change the brain, and yet look at gender identity and think the solution is changing the body?

I mean, the concept of "treating" autism (it's not an illness) is controversial anyway, but to take that approach and yet the opposite for gender identity stuff is just mind blowing. How can anyone be so thick?

Its a sort of weird social contagion thing, is it? A sort of mass hysteria that people are just not applying any critical thought.

Formication: the feeling of insects crawling across or under your skin. It is a type of paresthesia. Temporary parathesia is often due to pressure on a nerve - like from breast binding perhaps?

If you can borrow it from the library or via interlibrary loan then The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan is worth reading.

Repeatedly, [O'Sullivan] is forced to explain to communities and doctors that [functional neurological disorders (aka FNDs)] are “real” – “a result of physiological mechanisms” in the brain “that go awry to produce genuine physical symptoms and disability”. As recently as 2018, an academic paper dismissed [mass psychogenic illness (aka MPI)] as a diagnosis for the diplomats in Cuba because “neurological examination and cognitive testing did not reveal any evidence of malingering”, and insurance companies are less likely to pay out for conditions that are related to “stress”. Interestingly, MPIs tend to be rejected as an explanation for symptoms in adults, especially men, but caricatured as “just” mass hysteria when they are observed in women and girls. It’s no wonder that parents of the New York girls, backed by Brockovich, campaigned long and hard to find a different explanation for their daughters’ symptoms when medicine has historically written off so much of women’s pain, illness and injury as “hysteria”. O’Sullivan’s message is that these disorders are genuine and serious and that they can be alleviated when the psychological and social causes are addressed.

More controversially, she suggests that MPIs have a purpose. “Psychosomatic and functional disorders break the rules of every other medical problem because, for all the harm they do, they are sometimes indispensable,” she writes. In Nicaragua, she asks a local: “Do you have any thoughts about why young girls are more likely to be affected by grisi siknis?” He replies: “I don’t know … but I think maybe the girls are weak and grisi siknis makes them strong.” By making social problems visible on the body, O’Sullivan believes, these conditions allow voiceless people to tell their stories and to make themselves heard.

Guardian review: www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/14/the-sleeping-beauties-by-suzanne-osullivan-review-21st-century-health-mysteries

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1529010551/?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

That article / first person account of the process leading up to the surgery was absolutely chilling.

• Female child has perfectly average childhood/no body or emotional issues
• Approaches puberty and is becoming uncomfortable with self
• Psychologist parent predicts anorexia may be the next step, but phew! It's just body dysmorphia - luckily that's easily fixed!
• Child describes the feeling as having spiders crawling on the unwanted body part and can't leave her bed
• Psychiatrist tells family the only cure will be surgery
• Child had her breasts removed and is immediately cured.

If I felt like I had spiders crawling over one of my legs at 16 would they remove my leg?

What if I hated my eyes so much I couldn't open them. Would they remove my eyes at 16?

This is a sudden fixation with one body part which must be removed, and the same body part, amongst thousands of teenage girls all over the world. But no contagion here.

Some of the gender ideology stuff around kids and teens seemed off to me early on because I remember the kinds of things I thought and felt at that time, or because I can see things like social contagion working among kids. I remember what middle school girls were like, and how I felt like my body belonged to someone else.

How do these adults not realize that if you tell kids something, they believe it, and interpret what they see and feel from within that belief system?

That's all kind of basic, isn't it?

www.aims-2-trials.eu/about-aims-2-trials/team/university-of-glasgow/

She is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Glasgow University.

www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/healthwellbeing/staff/helenminnis/

How much influence does she have over what is going on in Scotland?

The figures I’ve read say that 200 children a year are saying they are trans, in Scotland, of all ages.

This FoI says 298 child referrals to Sandyford in 2018, and I've seen another that puts the figure closer to 400. In fact, every FoI request to Sandyford elicits varying figures.

And it's important to remember that the figures do not include the majority of 16 and 17 year olds as they are referred to the adult clinic at just over 16.

And if trans women are women when they have a penis why can't trans men who are still children and highly likely to change their minds, keep their breasts and still identify as a man?

Don't expect an answer to that one. I've been asking that question for years and I still haven't had an answer to it.

I feel like I live on a different planet!

And dictionary definitions are being changed around us in a real time newsspeak (see other threads on the redefinition of sexual orientation).

It is too many anyway, especially if they are using suicide risk as a reason for it - as the suicide rate for under 18 girls is very, very low. The rate of people, groomed online as to what to say to health professionals to push through their transition, claiming to be suicidal might be high but that is becoming a useless indicator as to real suicidal ideation/risk.

I would also want to see that all mental health co-morbidities had been successfully treated so that consent was ethically gained. I don't believe this could be the case.

Do they push through young girls for boob jobs, who claim their flat chested-ness makes then feel unfeminine? Or do they wait it out to see what maturity brings, while only "feeling my body is too feminine" has to be treated drastically like a disease?

It may be 200 per year are seen at Sandyford and get an official diagnosis?

It's worth pointing out that I think the 50 patients referred for surgery was over the course of 5 years, so that's more like 50 out of 1000 - which is still a lot!

This can't be accurate - there are 4 trans and 2 non binary children at my children's primary school alone

I agree. Even at a cursory glance those figures can't be accurate. I'm in England but I know a large number of family friends, neighbours, and people we meet through sports coaching session who all report this about their own children/wider family, children's friends, in their children's schools etc.

50 out of 200, presumably some will be boys so not needing mastectomies. That makes it standard practice.

200 might be those diagnosed with dysphoria, but there is a wave of children who have grown up, socially transitioned, that the NHS won't see until puberty.

She previously worked at a gender clinic and appears to have immediately accepted that her child was transgender and the "only treatment" was surgery. Symptoms in her female child first appeared around puberty.

Somehow this is more horrifying when the mother is an educated woman with specialist knowledge in the area of child mental health.

I agree, NiceGerbil. I have friends who have had mastectomies. I can’t imagine what hell they went through.

This is a very shocking thread but thank you for bringing it to our attention, OP.

'A Scottish government spokesman said: “A small number of young adults have been referred for chest reconstruction surgery at 17. '

Like collateral damage. Friendly fire.

To disguise the reality.

In this case. Reconstruction? So outrageous to use the word for women having reconstruction after mastectomy due to cancer.

And all to avoid using the actual term- double mastectomy.

Internalised misogyny from the US paediatrician who said that. Here she is on the record saying 'If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them': Jo Olson Kennedy recorded 6th July 2018 at Gender Spectrum Conference. She is married to a transman who works as a counsellor. They both make a living from affirmative gender therapy.

twitter.com/Mum3Sun/status/1020707915873890305?s=20

If you allow trans lobby groups to go into schools to actively teach children about a fictitious gender identity with a fairy at one end of the spectrum and GI Joe at the other, this is what happens.

They believe they are in the wrong body and a trans child is created.

It's a conveyor belt towards cutting off healthy body parts and lifelong medication.

I am so appalled that politicians cant see this dreadful scandal for what it is.