Carrie Grant: I no longer have three daughters.

And they are still adamant that there is no social contagion going on?
Seriously, what are the actual statistical chances of all three children being trans?

I call bollocks.

Oh gosh I just saw the daughter in Hollyoaks she is growing facial hair and has a deep voice … it’s so very disturbing. She seemed so vulnerable when she first got the job in the soap. I remember C and D bring all over that not even letting her have her own moment without sharing their opinions in her acting work.

FFS. Those of us who have to fight for funding to support our children know how stretched it is. I appreciate that they presumably wanted to do everything they could to keep him at home with the family but there comes a point where the needs of the other children (to live in a home without the constant violence that would warrant security guards) outweigh the needs of keeping everyone together. I can't understand how or why the LA decided to fund this.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that LAs make seemingly strange funding decisions in individual cases - our disabled children's team funnelled literally thousands into an account for my disabled DD for activities she couldn't access because of her specific disabilities (yes, they knew this), but on the other hand weren't able to fund the therapies that would have actually been helpful for her because it was from a different funding pot with a different bureaucratic process.

I can absolutely see how it might be easier for the council to buy in external services than to provide the kind of bespoke mental health support that might be needed to address the underlying issues, as the medical aspect of addressing the underlying issues often makes the bureaucracy far more challenging as the council push the problem onto the NHS and the NHS try to push it back to social care (as they often have their own psychology support for complex cases).

Even with integrated NHS/LA teams the bureaucracy is an absolute nightmare as they have to have very specific criteria and access pathways to operate under that model. But buying in security services sits squarely with the council, so it's a much easier 'fix' to try while working on a longer-term solution.

*ask their children questions

I think there is another way..

They could gently ask their questions which aren't based on a presumption that their gender identity is important. A differential diagnosis approach where they set aside gender identity and focus on other presenting factors.

An early intervention to say that it's OK to explore gender identity and it's OK not to rush to a destination/answer seems to be what they have done, from what I have read in their previous press releases.. but it has always been done from the viewpoint of gender identity being an important part of it all e.g. their "wait and see" involved telling them to think carefully about the impact of hormones on their body. This is only a part of the picture and comes with an intrinsic bias that gender identity is a fact, not a belief.

Instead, I think they could have got deeper in to understanding why their autistic girls were at odds with their own bodies, through an autism lens.

Are we allowed to mention the Baron here.?

Carrie Grant ( have never heard of her or him or their programmes, so My reaction is exactly the same as if it was Jenny Bloggs) does seem to encounter conflict quite a lot. Her comment about her parents is interesting, she seems to want to imply they are ‘racist’ ( the worst accusation in the vocabulary atm) without really being able to date that they were/are.

As others have said, if you have three troubled children with SN, is introducing a fourth with even more extreme needs the best strategy for the other children? This on top of demanding careers which involve very unsocial hours, and where the parents are working together, so cannot stagger their personal input.

TBH, who takes a severely autistic child to an awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace? They must have known that the poor child would be terrified and unable to cope with such an extreme environment….but they went ahead. It made them ‘proud’.

I don’t believe the local authority provided three security guards. I suspect that the child has been effectively returned to the care of the State.

I think Carrie might get on quite well with Susie.

I think 'whatever you do, it'll be wrong ' is parenting adolescents of any identity, isn't it? I don't necessarily think that the gender identity stuff is that different in that sense than any other way young people have tried to seperate and differentiate themselves from their parents over the generations.

But what we've got now is a perfect storm. Of young people trying to work out who they are and doing it in ways with potentially permanent life altering consequences. Whilst being encouraged both overtly and subtly by adults with vested interests quite different from the young people's. And by big businesses who can make a lot of money from life long medical patients. And by powerful lobbies influencing policy so that concerned parents or other trusted adults cannot protect the young people from harm while they go through this task of adolescence.

The young people developmentally are doing what young people have always done and need to do, it's the behaviour of society which is different with this. And the young people and their families will of course be the ones left dealing with the consequences.

It’s a very old picture though. Two of the girls have not yet discovered their male identity, and the boy is not 13.

I looked here back in April when Tylan had their breasts removed to see if it had been mentioned but I couldn't find anything. I wasn't brave enough to start a thread. But the rabbit hole I fell down reading about the grants really kind of upset me.

This whole thing seems so disturbing to me, I just cant get my head around it at all.

How were they even allowed to adopt?

DunkingMyDonuts that prediction sounds worryingly right. I wonder if part of this in some situations is about kids knowingly or unwittingly finding an issue of inevitable adult loss of authority, to force their parent/s (and authority figures like teachers) to think on their feet on an issue that the adults can only ever fail at. In an age of social media particularly, that suddenly hands a lot of power to the gender identity-claiming young person. It also puts a lot of focus on the listener and how they deal with it, less so on the young person, which may feel good to the young person.

And also the opposite can also be true- I do also agree with a pp on a previous page in this thread that gender identity might be a way for relatively privileged white middle class teenagers with trauma to try to express that- to say that things are so wrong that they now think something completely unreal is real and now everyone else has to support them in that. There, it’s maybe more about an invitation for the adults concerned to come out to fight for them, to support them, make the young person feel important and secure and the focus in a way they really need to feel.

We don’t know what’s going on with any family obviously. My take home from others’ experiences is just that professionals need to be trained and funded to look at each case individually and deeply and carefully over time. Social transition should be treated as cautiously as medical transition should be. CAMHS might as well not be there for the time it takes to access help so that service needs massive funding increase.

Is there more we could do, like maybe could secondaries all have the mental health equivalent of a school nurse, on site, accessible, signposting to immediate counselling help? I just feel suddenly getting into gender identity is a visible symptom of a much wider mental health crisis at population level for young people. And we need to be able to help them all a lot more effectively then we do now.

The sad thing is whatever they do - it will always be wrong. Their kids will throw all the help back in their face in the years to come.

If they have told the girls it is just a phase/ bandwagon and to get over it - WRONG "you should have respected my feelings and done x/y/z"

If they accepted their new gender and respected it - WRONG "you should have realised I was going through x/y/z and supported me to see another way"

If they just gently accept their children's feeling and carry on as usual - WRONG "I wanted you to tell everyone how proud you were of me and my new status, and your quietness showed you were secretly ashamed"

If they trump it from the rooftops and tell everyone - WRONG "you embarrassed me and it was MY information to share, not yours"

We have NO WAY of parenting children that decide to live in a way no other generation has. We are at a loss and even think you have it correct, you are in for a shock in the years to come when they tell you how wrong you got it

My thoughts too . Who was looking after the kids and how did they cope ? Maybe a succession of nannies that just gave in to the kids for a quiet life ?

If I was called Carrie Grant and had three daughters I would have called them Judy, Judy and Judy.

Takes coat and leaves <not sorry>

No, it definitely says it in the article. I’ve a vested interest in retaining this information as I am an adopter to a traumatised teen who is disabled due to her pre-natal experiences and who is also violent, aggressive and emotionally abusive to her much younger sister and I. Unfortunately, I am not rich or famous so I will never have security guards deployed to my battle field of a home by my local authority.

Phew! Glad I wasn't the cause of misinformation. I couldn't remember what I'd read in the article.

Well on that note.... FFS. Those of us who have to fight for funding to support our children know how stretched it is. I appreciate that they presumably wanted to do everything they could to keep him at home with the family but there comes a point where the needs of the other children (to live in a home without the constant violence that would warrant security guards) outweigh the needs of keeping everyone together. I can't understand how or why the LA decided to fund this.

It's in the article:

For three months we had security guards, paid for by the local authority. I know this sounds crazy, but it happens. Big burly guys on your sofa. When Nathan did explode, the security guards were really scared

I call bullshit on that, which makes me wonder what else in the book isn't entirely candid.

There have been a few posts saying/intimating that the private security was funded by the LA.

I don't think it states this in the article.

I'm wondering if my post about residential schools with LA funding may have caused a misunderstanding? I can't imagine any situation where the LA would fund security guards in a family home. This part must have been privately funded by them.

It was basically an advertorial for their new book.

I think they have a book to sell… on parenting.

I probably wont be buying this one, though the one they write in five years time might be interesting.

you couldn't get to the refining and understanding the real meaning of the pattern (social custom that's not binding or universal, or something more inherent to sex differences, whatever,) without making those initial, often very broad and even gross, generalizations.

That's interesting, especially as it applies to what children are being taught in schools and pre-school settings. The contradictions between what they see and what they're taught about sex and gender could be jarring and hard to navigate safely.

Also... hearing about families with multiple children medicating I am starting to wonder if there will be real economic impacts and demands on the health service in a few years time. Even if children aren't allowed to transition it's not hard to start medicating from age 18 onwards and for years afterwards. Long term use of anabolic steroids isn't healthy.

I think they have a book to sell… on parenting.

They were was on The Today programme r4 just now... I missed most of it, will catch it on Sounds.

Ah OK. I hadn't read the Cambridge one in ages.

Great picture 😂 A perfect illustration of the issue with it all being flipped the wrong way round as a starting point.

The equivalent would be if a bunch of cat accessory providers (cat flaps, bowls, scratch poles etc) decided they needed to make everything from reinforced materials because of the evidence of the damage cats can do.

It's just utterly flawed science.

As an adopter who has experienced child to parent violence, and knowing several other adopters who've experienced it much more severely than me, I just do not believe that their local authority paid for burly security guards to sit in their living room. I can well believe their son has significant needs, as residential placements aren't exactly given out like smarties, but security guards? No.

I am deeply uncomfortable about the way these parents have chosen to publicise private and difficult information about their children, birth and adopted. I certainly don't think they're in any position to write parenting books, as I think that apart from anything else they have completely painted their children into a corner re the gender ID stuff. Have they had a chance to grow out of gender confusion, as the majority of children do given time and space, when their parents are publicising their trans identity and gaining plaudits for it?