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Original poster

Do a very small minority of children need medical and surgical intervention for gender dysphoria?

57 replies

ATeamAmy · 11/04/2022 19:33

Whilst watching an otherwise excellent interview on GB news, where Andrew Doyle interviews barristers Sarah Phillimore and Dennis Kavanagh about the Conversion Therapy Bill, SP said something that concerned me. At 15.40, she says:

"A very small minority of children may need medical and surgical intervention."

Says who, which medical experts have decided any child needs medical and surgical intervention for gender dysphoria and can they be trusted not to be shills for the trans lobby and pharmaceutical companies seeking to capitalise on this trend? On what criteria will this happen? Who are the gatekeepers of this? What about Gillick competence with respect to these cases, will the loophole achieved by the Good Law Project allow parents to impose this on their children? What is to prevent these exceptional rules being exploited once again by the trans lobby?

My view is that nobody as a child (i.e. under 18) should be given any hormone/surgical intervention, and that the only medical intervention they should receive is talking therapy and treatment for any co -morbidities that may be at the heart of the dysphoria. I'm quite concerned about throw away remarks like this being made by the GC side, because the slope is a slippery one, and it does tend to suggest that some children may indeed be affirmed as having been born "in the wrong body"; for why else then, would surgery (no matter how exceptional) be advocated for any child?

OP posts:
mudgetastic · 11/04/2022 19:45

There have always been people who can't cope and for some of them the treatments might help abs be better than alternative

Most medical treatment have side effects - we give children chemo if it's deemed appropriate

MangyInseam · 11/04/2022 19:44

I think there is no evidence of that.

But it may be she did not feel she could categorically say none did, given that some doctors seem to think it's the case.

Slothtoes · 11/04/2022 19:44

I’m not sure that there is evidence that medical transitioning is of long term benefit to under 18s.
Let alone risks outweighed by benefit when they are living their lives for all the subsequent decades of being adults (into their elderly years). Unbelievably it does seem this kind of research hasn’t been started or done. Has anybody been asking them as adults how they feel about their childhood transition and transitioned adult life, about their medical conditions caused by the medications and surgeries, the loss of natural fertility, whether their mental health has improved and if so whether they feel that has outweighed the physical side effects caused by transition? the list goes on.

Linguini · 11/04/2022 19:43

It wouldn't surprise me if that was the best option for a tiny proportion of children

Why though?

And since when?

When in the entire history of humankind has any child ever, been better off injecting themselves with untested off label drugs, and surgically mutilating a perfectly healthy body?

Since when has this ever been on the table for children?

tabbycatstripy · 11/04/2022 19:41

I don’t know. I don’t know whether there is a group of children who have presented “as the opposite sex” since they were so young that detransition would be more harmful to them psychologically than hormones and surgery.

I don’t believe in innate gender incongruence (so I think there’s always something else going on for these children), but the question is whether it can be corrected without serious, avoidable distress.

I would want to see a root and branch review of the whole ‘gender medicine’ space and a deep dive into the causes of dysphoria before I had an opinion.

mudgetastic · 11/04/2022 19:36

It wouldn't surprise me if that was the best option for a tiny proportion of children

Unfortunately the whole "trend" has probably made those children hard to identify, meaning outcomes for such children likely to become worse

By tiny I mean a teacher might come across one such child in their whole career

Original poster
ATeamAmy · 11/04/2022 19:34

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