Janice Turner in the Times on what went wrong at the Tavistock

Oh, this is going to be controversial. But I think we have inadvertently done a huge amount of harm with the mantra (repeated in an effort to rightly destigmatize mental illness) that mental illnesses are just like physical illnesses.

Mental ill health is a result of environment or experience. I'm not going to say it never has a spontaneous biological cause because I cannot prove that. We have got to a place where we believe theories (e.g. monamine depression theory) as fact and rely on medication to treat what are normal responses to negative situations. What we view as 'normal' or non-pathological behaviour has an ever narrower range. The majority of the population has some kind of diagnosis.

The treatment of gender dysphoria is no different to the treatment for other kinds of mental ill health, for which the initial offerings are also medication.

One thing that strikes many people is wondering how doctors can be complicit in this. Medical doctors are susceptible to these horrors because the way they work means they rarely take personal responsibility for their work. Sounds wrong right? But if you look at the legal side it's very uncommon for doctors to be prosecuted because they tend to band together to protect one another. Obviously good for them but it means that more often than you mught expect, they aren't held accountable for their actions.

Thought exactly this

“So I think we have a group who, at one time, would have been anorexic. A lot of them became self-harmers, had borderline personalities, and then became transgender. So they’re people dealing with similar kinds of problems, but they get refracted through the lens of what’s going on in the culture.”

As someone who first became anorexic as a teenager, and has struggled with eating disorders ever since, this is the reason I first became alarmed by this social contagion. The similarities were so clear to me from the outset. I am so pleased to see this being highlighted.

It's in the Saturday Times Magazine section today so will reach a wide audience.

Excellent articles, thanks for sharing them.

Thanks for the share tokens. Both articles were excellent.

Ah but this can all be hand-waved away with a graph showing the increase in people who are left-handed after it became more accepted, apparently.

i'd not seen this before but as a left handed person I've always been interested in how many of us there are. It's absolutely true that the percentage of left handed people is higher in societies where there is no/minimal stigma against left handedness. However, we are only talking of a difference of around 10%. This is totally different to the increase in referrals of girls wanting to transition.

Thanks for the links - great articles.

Ah but this can all be hand-waved away with a graph showing the increase in people who are left-handed after it became more accepted, apparently.

(That's the latest TRA argument, I'm sick of the sight if that damned graph.)

Agree, great journalism. Although it makes me feel a bit angry and sick.)

They’ll still deny, obfuscate and bullshit. Ideology rides roughshod over evidence and facts and reality as we’ve seen only too well over the just 10 years.

it’s great that the Times is shining light on these unethical medical practices, though, I agree. It’s a brilliant article.

Two fantastic pieces of journalism. I hope Kath Viner at The Guardian reads them. I will buy a paper copy tomorrow. The anger will never go away though, and my loss of trust in authority. And young adults are still having their lives ruined, I know one and it breaks my heart.

Archive link (nada paywall) for the Telegraph article: archive.ph/mfDcy

Scroll through this thread
ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/107616/we-are-sacrificing-our-children-on-the-altar-of-a-brutal-far-left-ideology-jorda

That is cracking journalism. I cancelled my guardian subscription after their horrific coverage of the WiSpa incident. This has now cemented it for me, i am taking out a subscription to thw Times, and will be writing to the editor to tell them why.

I would distrust any movement that displays a toral lack of curiosity and questioning. The fact that gender ideology consistently tries to sweep this shit under the carpet should be enough to have alarm bells ringing all over the place. These are some of the most vulnerable kids in the country we are talking about, and they are being brutalised on the back of next to no evidence of benefit and no follow up thay would conclusively show the risks of harm.

Organisations like SW should be sinking their millions into more research, to help understand the needs of gender questioning young people and support them in the most effective ways. But they wont because nothing is allowed to threaten the ideology. They will not hear the inconvenient truths. And that is why they are so fucking dangerous.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/16/sacrificing-children-altar-brutal-far-left-ideology/

There may be reading options in the usual places

Telegraph don't do share tokens I'm afraid, and if I cut and paste it gets modded away. Sorry

Is there any way to link to that telegraph article?

This quote from Dr Bell resonates. Not just about what is happening now but so many cultural things that are reflected back at us via the pain of young women and girls.

“So I think we have a group who, at one time, would have been anorexic. A lot of them became self-harmers, had borderline personalities, and then became transgender. So they’re people dealing with similar kinds of problems, but they get refracted through the lens of what’s going on in the culture.”

Oh that article is amazing and horrifying - how can medical professionals have been complicit in this? I note the line about even stonewall can sense things are changing

Suzanne Moore has also written a very pointed thread about the horrors of this experimentation on young girls.

twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1537840392271536128

Between these two articles and the strongly worded one by Jordan Peterson in yesterdays Telegraph it feels like they are now pulling no punches about child transition. I know they have reported on it for a few years now but more cautiously and couched in gentler language.

I'm wondering if some sections of the press have had a preview or heads up about the imminent Cass Review?

In Lucy's article, when Alex describes not being able to feel love or understand what attraction feels like because of blocked puberty... well, that's utterly heartbreaking.

Specialist Commissioning

www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/spec-services/npc-crg/gender-dysphoria-clinical-programme/gender-dysphoria/

The comparison to lobotomy is one I've seen before but never so powerfully as here.

This will be (I hope - part of me thinks it'll be swept under the rug) an utterly incomprehensible scandal in the future.

I've been thinking lately, as many have, about cutting subscriptions to save money. This is why I won't cut my sub to The Times.

A shame the comments are being pre-moderated but what a cracking article.

When this all comes out in court in the wash, I'm pretty certain that we will discover that NHS commissioners were lobbied too. I remember a discussion on these boards I had with R0 about this a few years ago.

For those who are unfamiliar with the system, a single commissioning group contracts nationally provided services on behalf of other local commissioning organisations throughout the country. While this is efficient, it unfortunately also means if that organisation puts idealism ahead of safeguarding, they are less likely to be challenged by other organisations.

Added to which it is considered "good" commissioning to involve patient representatives and or representative organisations. Getting patients representatives of working age to attend daytime meetings can be challenging, so involving - only too happy to rock up - lobby groups is an apparent solution.

This is no more than speculation, I have no specific knowledge of how the commissioning was done in this instance. My hunch though is that lobbyists would have been able to influence non-clinical commissioners and non-specialist clinicians. Commissioning has been GP led for over a decade now, where were the endocrinologists, the psychologists and the safeguarding experts?