‘NHS trans surgery damaged my body for ever — it’s not safe’

Richie is amazing. Very smart, and very brave.

I can't imagine what it must be like to live with the body he has now, and to be in chronic pain.

It is also recognised that for OCD you do NOT accommodate obsessions and compulsions as this makes them worse.

Yes, although I had several patients with OCD who spent so long considering the risks of curative lung cancer surgery they’d become inoperable by the time they consented. Very very difficult to deal with as a health care professional.

...OCD is also legally considered a disability. Its relevance to the fixation that surgery will make everything ok is both obvious and highly likely - under affirmation-only by definition - to have been ignored.

I don't know the specific details of the legal case, but it may be because people with autism are disproportionately represented on the surgery list that it's considered indirect discrimination?

There could also be a failure to consider the relevance and impact of his legal disability, and what reasonable adjustments might be appropriate.

It’s quite clear that they aren’t clear enough on the negatives of surgery. The person we know literally thought that heterosexual men would want to date them after surgery, it was a shock they weren’t all gagging to sleep with them.

I’m not a fan of suing the NHS, but maybe genital reassignment surgery should be viewed as “high risk”, like maternity/obstetrics, because when things go wrong it’s hugely expensive for Trusts in compensation pay-outs. If nothing else, surgery’s potential side-effects and complications and its sheer irreversibility must be made horrifyingly clear in surgical consent literature/forms. Neither patients nor providers should undertake this stuff lightly.

My understanding is that he's also suing. If true, any damages from that may enable him to access private healthcare for any necessary remedial surgery to help with chronic problems e.g. with urination. If he has the means to go private it will presumably be a much shorter waiting time for anything he needs.

I don’t think he is suing them as well is he? I know he has put in a judicial review but I hadn’t heard that he was suing too.

The guess the ideal outcome from a judicial review would be hugely tightening the parameters under which gender surgery can take place, if at all, so others don’t suffer the same as him.

So much of this agenda relies on bystanders really enjoying the scolding of others, the feeling righteous and special and progressive, and virtue signalling cookies.

Useful idiots. Who are doing it for themselves, and not the people they're using for their own emotional need-meeting.

This is so awful: parents gaining, or trying to gain, kudos from this over SM. The poor children are just props in a narcissistic, exploitative endeavour.

I’d distance myself very rapidly from any parent doing this with their child.

What is the ideal outcome for Ritchie at this point; I mean will money potentially won from suing help at all?

The surgery is not reversible, but can the chronic side effects be alleviated within the private sector? Will additional therapy help him come to terms with himself?

I don't know how you face up to a life spent in a body with such limitations in terms of health and relationships. Especially when your "community" turns its back on you.

@WarriorN I agree with this about some mothers. An online acquaintance who has since badmouthed me and unfriended me over my perceived terfiness is positively gleeful about her trans daughter. She was visibly annoyed that daughter was not posting anything for trans day of remembrance, so said she was doing it for her. She's made it her identity, and of course now identifies as "queer" despite having always been in relationships with men.

Absolutely.

Morse things going on behind the scenes though.

Unfortunately there's a group of parents, often mothers, who appear to be overly affirming and enjoy the attention on social media.

I have a friend whose son when he was little loved wearing dresses and being a princess. She just let him get on with it without comment. He’s now a ‘typical’ teenage boy, short hair and trousers. No affirmation needed, no thoughts of transition. He just followed his interests and she allowed him to. That’s surely what we should encourage children to do, explore and be themselves free of gender stereotypes. Then there will presumably be far fewer children thinking there’s something wrong with them.

Yeah 100 sessions is worth shit if it's 100 sessions all basically preparing you and asking if you are ready for your surgery and if you say no to surgery you can't have any therapy.

You didn't need to read the comments - nail on head @Grumblevision

Model, not module. Soz!

I've not read all comments, sorry if already said, but I think the fact that he had therapy and was still given treatments that were unsuitable isn't the gotcha some people think it is - it shows that the therapeutic methods themselves are inadequate in their current form. Affirmation isn't investigative therapy. That's the whole point. 100 hours and they still got it wrong, because the module they follow is biased. Hammer? Nail.

That small child will almost certainly be on a road to medical transition. It may seem easy now to allow him to believe he is a girl, but soon enough it will be clear to all that he is not, and a more serious identity crises has been set up.

And the "solution" will be medical transition.

Comforting lies usually aren't.

@MumOfYoungTransAdult thanks, I accept all of your points and appreciate the additional context.

you're right no other part of the nhs just blindly does what a patient wants

I was all lined up for a hysterectomy (that by that point I really really wanted, and needed) had the pre op assessment...date and time slot.

Got a blood clot in my leg the next day so no operation.

They won't do it now because the risk is too high. You can imagine I was not very happy! But my consultant weighed up risk v benefits and decided it wasn't worth the risk.

You don't always get what you want, why does this group of patients? Especially when it's not actually solving a physical problem with a body but a mental one. It's not actually going to harm them in any way to remain in their intact healthy body. Yes it may cause them mental distress, but that is treatable through therapy.

The NHS frequently does and says things that individual patients disagree with and kick off about. Because what a patient wants, and thinks is happening, and what is actually appropriate or possible treatment, are often not the same thing. Treatment is not based on patient satisfaction and it would not be a good thing for it to be.

It's confusing 'not giving me what I want/not making me happy' with 'doing something wrong'.

However this is the only area of treatment backed by a political lobby successfully frightening medics into fear of displeasing the said lobby and the consequences of doing so. And through that fear, they are failing vulnerable patients.

It's awful and it's unfortunate. But ultimately, they chose to do this to themselves!

I'm sure we had a thread where this went round in circles.

It's not about the individual. It's the diagnostic processes.

The diagnosis and associated medical treatment is not evidence based either anyway.

Given medical transitions on the nhs are double what they were 10 years ago, that's a huge drain on a service that is not evidence based and potentially harmful longer term.

This is my opinion too. If they had been refused, the suit would have been about that.

Also crazy that they got all that therapy despite waiting lists.