Mysterious drop in GIDS Waiting List…

My teen still has some close friends who are still identifying as either the opposite sex or as non-binary still too. But most of my teen's new friends in sixth form and outside school have no trans identities.

Lucky you.
I checked in with my teenager a couple of weeks ago.
At the end of a very difficult conversation I had established that 3 of her 4 closest friends identify as boys.
If the trend is over, they haven't seen the memo.

Or even just transition ideation.

Gender distress is a massive family disrupter.

I know two who have not yet medicalised where their entire family life has been turned upside down. I think that many people who make that 'without any harm' underestimate just how much harm is done by social transitioning.

IIRC Monty was on hormones via GenderGP (lots of muttering about temporary lack of access to hormones when the Liverpool based pharmacy partner was in trouble a few years back) and lots of GPs refuse to work with GenderGP customers now, even if they did in the past.

I expect Monty’s NHS GP has decided not to prescribe cross sex hormones can unless in a shared care agreement with an NHS gender specialist, which Monty doesn’t have due to using GenderGP (followed by surgery in Thailand).

Now that GenderGP has fallen apart at the seams increasing number of their customers will be approaching NHS GPs and asking them to take over GenderGP prescriptions.

@CantDealwithChristmas

This is false and suggests a profound ignorance of the modern Western scientific process.

Quite right. The entire fields of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy are in the middle of a giant crisis of reproducibility so it's already pretty credulous to take their pontifications at face value, let alone base medical treatments on it.

Pretending that normal feelings of bodily anxiety, and the not-so-normal feelings (dysmorphia) are somehow the result if a gendered sould prevents us as a society, and also the medical community, from understanding what is really going wrong and how to actually solve it.

An entire generation has been failed by those supposed to protect them.

Apologies for double quoting you but I also just wanted to pick up on your statement:

"We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this"

This is false and suggests a profound ignorance of the modern Western scientific process.

In Western medicine we still adhere to the prinicple of 'do no harm' and this is backed up by a huge body of medical law which prevents surgeons in particular from carrying out surgeries which do not follow a standard protocol and have a small range of anticipated outcomes. Where complications are anticipated there's usually a widely agreed response.

In the area of experimental transgender surgery all this has been thrown out the window. Children and adults have undergone unnecessary and life changing surgeries such as double mastectomy, the removal of vital arm and fat muscle, experimentally stitching flesh and skin onto their mons pubis, the flaying and destruction of the penis, and much more. Some of these surgeries have led to permanent disability and, likely, a shortened lifespan.

There is NO other area of modern western medical/surgical practice where it would be acceptable to 'experiment' on patients' anatomy with the blithe assurance that "We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this."

For example if a surgeon performed an entirely experimental animal skin graft on a burns patient, with the knowledge that the protocol had not been approved by regulators, subjected to peer review, practsied, and all outcomes planned for, she would be imprisioned. She would not be able to use as her defence in court "We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this" because that is not how western medicine works, thank Goddess.

Apart from in transgenderism, where vulnerable and mentally ill adults and children have been experiemnted upon and left permanently altered and disabled.

I want all of these vulnerable and medically damaged people to get justice. I'm aware that there is at least one large class action underway in California and I look forward to following its process eagerly as it will likely provide a pattern for eventaul public prosecutions in the UK.

'Without any harm done' is a massively disengenous comment and I'm sure the parents of kids who detransition would have few choice words to say on that - even those who never medicalised.

Let me stress there are STILL thousands of kids who HAVE been caught up in trans trending in their social group. What is trendy in one social circle can be the height of unfashionable for another. But the point is it is still a trend.

And for those thousands caught up in it there are social implications to their family relationships and their social relationships and to their academic performance and relationships with authority at school before we even talk about the medical implications.

It pisses me right off to say that these kids don't matter because there's not that many of them. This doesn't stop this being a huge medical and safeguarding scandal.

We don't go 'oh well only 10000 infants were affected by thalidomide use during pregnancy do we?

Fucks sake. Get your head out your arse and give a shit about these kids cos so many people don't appear to. They are just collateral damage to justify the existence of late transitioning males.

Respectfully I disagree.

There is plenty of evidence that TRAs, especially those who have undergone surgical intervention, are actively working to encourage mentally vulnerable young people to do the same. If you look at social media channels like JammyDodger, CuriousSeahorse, and also at the 'egg cracking' subreddits and on Discord, you will see a clear commitment to encouraging unsure and vulnerable children onto, first PBs (with the false promise of reversibility), then hormones (with the false promise of reversibility) and finally onto surgery (with the false promise of a successful outcome, which is NOT currently medically possible. It just isn't.).

My belief has always been that gender dysphoria is a form of body dysmorphia in the way that eating disorders can also be. There's no such thing as trans children, just mentally ill children. And they will not be helped by unnecessary and damaging experimental sugeries. They will be helped by early and efficacious psychological intervention, especially DBT, which is rarely offered on the NHS because it's difficult and time consuming to provide well, but is life changing when done properly.

Some children can say that they are trans because it's fashionable to be edgy and not a boring cis-het. For them, it will be very transient, and no harm will happen. Some will have other issues, of mental health or not - anxiety, bullying, ASD, budding homosexuality - and will confuse their mental distress with the necessity to transition. "Social contagion", though, doesn't mean that you transition because it's trendy. Social contagion refers to the same mechanism by which anorexia, bulimia, self-harming, have spread through the (predominantly female) population. Obviously the stop to the prescription of puberty blockers is good news from this point of view, but if there are no professionals helping these teenagers, who will help them to understand if they really need hormones at 17? (This assumes that a very small percentage does really benefit from transitioning - in reality, I tend to doubt it - NICE found the evidence low quality EVEN for hormones in adults. But you never know, maybe more data will clarify things).

I expect some trans, and some (probably most) will desist at some point without any harm being done.

Jolly good. What about the ones where harm is done?

David Bell, when being interviewed on the PM programme, was very clear that there is no such thing as a “trans child”.

Monty was complaining on Twitter yesterday that his GP had refused to give a repeat prescription for his cross sex hormones. Obviously there might be some back story as to why the GP refused (for example, it might be required that all patients see a specialist at intervals) but Monty’s claim was that the GP was gender critical.

Maybe an increasing number of doctors are actually becoming aware that a scandal is brewing and don’t want to find themselves implicated.

MissLucy, when you wrote, 'As a GP, I'd say exactly the opposite is true. The adverse publicity around the Tavi, Gender GP, Keira Bell etc etc has made GPs more wary of prescribing (and rightly so)', what prescriptions are you referring to?

I supervise lots of CAMHS psychologists - these were the professionals I was referring to. 10 years ago, they tended to refer to GIDS when they (rarely) came across YP with symptoms of gender dysphoria, feeling that highly specialist care was needed. As cases increased, they initially did the same. More recently, when encountering YP who initially present as experiencing gender dysphoria, the treating practitioners have felt more confident in exploring and treating the patient's distress without referring on. Parents and the YP typically welcome this as they are desperate for help.

The GenderGP sub Reddit is interesting. It seems a dodgy pair running a dodgy outfit are in fact doing incredibly dodgy things.

No-one deserves to be ripped off but entrusting your health and wellbeing to them two was never going to end well. They have been well and truly exploited.

The whole service is a mess.

They didnt see the increase in demand coming, they had no way of going through the referrals to determine who needs treatment, and the treatment they gave is proven to be lacking.

Its not trans health care, its cruel.

TRA never showed any concern about these facts, they just pushed for more medicalisation for an undiagnosable condition. Its breathtaking for someone to have the brass balls to say its a good thing the clinic never had a clue how many children were held in limbo thinking they were trans.

Was just about to say that myself!

There were never going to be legions of kids 'being trans to be trendy' who were actually going to go as far as medical intervention because if you're doing it to be trendy that's going to be a bridge too far.

Sadly many girls who were swept up by this craze have had medical intervention. In this country this has mainly been restricted to puberty blockers (apart from those who were unfortunate enough to have been 'treated' by the likes of the Webberleys), but in the US many teenage girls have also had mastectomies.

trans children do exist

They do not. Nobody is born in the wrong body.

Trans rights activists have never wanted to 'trans' cis kids, this isn't a sign of 'defeat' for trans rights - they just want the trans kids to be helped

TRAs, particularly middle-aged male transitioners, have encouraged the idea of the 'trans child' as a sort of human shield. Trans children are an important part of sanitising 'transness' so that it is not seen as something sexual. They help to protect the middle-aged male transitioners from criticism by being viewed as the younger versions of those males.

TRAs don't care about the harm done to these human shields.

This is a good result then. I am glad for your family.

There is no such thing as ‘transgender child’.

To me this just displays why all the moral panic around 'trans trending' has been utterly unnecessary. There were never going to be legions of kids 'being trans to be trendy' who were actually going to go as far as medical intervention because if you're doing it to be trendy that's going to be a bridge too far. I know or have known about a dozen trans kids - 3 have desisted after a few years, none of the other 9 have any interest in medical intervention but have been socially transitioned for at least 2 years. I expect some are trans, and some (probably most) will desist at some point without any harm being done. And I think this is the picture for the vast majority of trans identifying kids.

We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this, and yes, I think there's a degree of fashion, but trans children do exist and hope we can move to a stage where people get the treatment they need, whether thats trans affirmation or some other kind of mental health support.

Trans rights activists have never wanted to 'trans' cis kids, this isn't a sign of 'defeat' for trans rights - they just want the trans kids to be helped and if services are being better targeted and kids aren't tying themselves in knots about gender identity when that's not the issue, then that's a great outcome in my books.

Arden and GEM are an unusual trust who don't deliver clinical services but specialise in data analysis, business planning, HR and so on - basically all the support services you need.

So I would suspect their data gathering is accurate, who knows about what it was before.

I am profoundly irritated by GIDS' data and record-keeping.

However, as a separate issue, if this claim is accurate, something is going badly awry. My difficulty is that Strudwick doesn't strike me as somebody who would have done sufficient due diligence to assess this claim

Arden and GEM in November 2022, there were around 300 new referrals per month, staff said, so if that continued there would now be about 10,000 on the waiting list.

Presumably, Simon Wesseley will have the board issue a clarification on this although his remit is the Research Oversight Board. Or Wesseley's counterpart on commissioning, James Palmer (?).

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

https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/spec-services/npc-crg/gender-dysphoria-clinical-programme/implementing-advice-from-the-cass-review/cyp-gender-dysphoria-research-oversight-board/

There was certainly an incentive to show high demand for the service, then suddenly theres incentive to show there isn't.