Dr David Bell

Perhaps ' meaningful care' is dealing with the trauma so that the young person accepts that s/he is actually in the right body. Not a body destroyed by hormones and surgery. Just a thought.

Thankyou for the concern. I will admit that it is incredibly, witheringly psychologically taxing to continue fighting for the future of kids who are in much the same situation I was and have had their futures cruelly torn away by what amounts to little more than ideological posturing in many cases. To do so in the face of seething hostility, page after page, day after day, for several years at this point while watching the world steadily nose dive directly into reactionary transphobic populism has definitely taken its toll.

I don't do this for fun. I could be watching the rest of Black Doves or blowing off steam with a fun boardgame or videogame, or a lovely new book - but instead I'm desperately trying to salvage some hope for the future. Because it's still worth fighting for. I'm not ready to give up.

If any of this ends up meaning that even one child gets a ray of hope where before things seemed hopeless - and they have been pretty fucking unrelentingly hopeless since 2020 at this point - then it will have been worth it.

Thankyou.

He never actually treated childhood Gender Incongruence, never worked in GIDS and in fact worked on adults in a completely different department in a completely different building.

He has presented a story where a group of transphobes and conversion therapists who had infiltrated the organisation over time met with him in secret and presented their 'concerns'. In truth, these were largely historical issues from disgruntled ideologues about the more chaotic early days of the service alongside a rising tide of reactionary transphobic rhetoric - much of which was espoused by staff who had found their growing hostility toward softening cultural attitudes toward trans people and the neutrality of a 'trans outcome' to be incompatible with a service that centred a compassionate policy of epistemic justice.

A dubious doom-laden report was submitted by him to the Board of Directors,
which the trust identified as comprising a list of historical issues which had already been addressed and inciting even greater abuse toward existing staff. He was threatened with disciplinary action and then quit rather than be fired.

He has since been lionised by the reactionary press alongside two prominent conversion therapists - one of whom used to work in GIDS but left when it became clear her views weren't compatible with actually providing meaningful treatment to the children she'd been charged with helping.

You'll find most of the rhetoric surrounding GIDS is hopelessly naïve, often involving highly confused timelines that shift events and schools of thought around by whole decades at a time, and clearly focussed more toward building a sensational and spicy story that will drive headlines than it is toward accurately reflecting the true events.

Truth is often the first casualty when a hack with an agenda catches a whiff of a career-making big break.

@ButterflyHatched , please take this in the spirit it is intended. You don’t sound well this evening. Your anger- which I recognise from your perspective is justified- is carrying you away. Tonight you do not sound like yourself, and may need to take a breather and regain some balance.

We are all invested- we all have children we care about, trauma that makes us hyper vigilant, or relationships that have been turned upside down. We all care passionately. We all need a break sometimes.

Tonight I think you might need some self care.

They've denied the kids who follow in my footsteps a future

That makes it seem as though you think like the Pied Piper.

Your footsteps are not steps to a future. You do what you feel right for you. Leave ‘kids’ alone.

You are aware that an autism (or ADHD, or any other similar neurotype) diagnosis would have generally excluded you from treatment as a member of this cohort, right?

I assume "excluded from treatment" in this context means someone not receiving puberty blockers and/or cross sex hormones.
I should imagine/hope that anyone with autism who was struggling with sensory issues and/or their body changing during puberty would have been given treatment appropriate to their autism (e.g. Occupational Therapy to help with any body disassociation that may have resulted from this), following a differential diagnosis. Hopefully that's how things will progress now too, rather than social transition happening as a first step i.e. a differential diagnosis to work out what may be the root cause of the distress without making any changes to pronouns etc.

As in, it is literally impossible for the older stats to reflect the neurodiversity of trans people because almost no neurodiverse trans people were allowed to get a diagnosis.

A diagnosis of what? Autism-related puberty distress, linked to cognitive processing of how males and females are "supposed" to be and/or distress about their changing bodies?

You'd just get blocked from even starting the discussion from the outset. I know several people who that happened to.

If "blocked" means not socially transitioning as a first step, but instead neutrally exploring someone's distress without any presupposition that they "are trans", this is a good thing. It doesn't have to be confrontational or dismissive. For example, a counsellor could use no pronouns at all for the child, meaning that there is no affirmation of preferred pronouns but equally no use of sex-based pronouns. Instead, open questions could be asked to unpick more about how the child feels about themselves and what they are struggling with.

Ableism and transphobia go hand in hand, always.

It's not clear what either of these is in this context. It's not ableist or transphobic to understand and meet an autistic child's Speech and Language Therapy (SALT) needs. It's to be expected that autistic children may need support in this area, making sense of all the information about the difference between the sexes and how this is connected to sex-based cultural expectations and limitations. And how it feels if you don't meet those supposed "standards" (and perhaps learning that most people don't), especially if you're already feeling angry/confused/sensory issues about your body changing during puberty.

He's definitely one of the good guys.

Here you are Yellowbananas - here's Dr Bell talking about what happened at GIDs at the Tavistock. He was one of the whistleblowers who exposed the way children - particularly autistic girls - were being gaslit by the trans lobby grouops and unprofessional medics prescribing them unevidenced puberty blockers etc. He's calm, knowledgeable and compassionate:

Im so confused by this thread. Ive never heard of Dr David Bell before - as I personally think (know!) transwomen are not women, Im gender critical etc (and also autistic/not always able to follow threads!) is David Bell someone I should like/respect or the opposite? Ta muchly.

I think I applauded you @Datun basically meaning Yes! Agreed! They're all positive emojis really although the laugh could potentially go either way 😁

They've denied the kids who follow in my footsteps a future

A future full of internal injuries, sterility, surgery that may or may not create something with an appearance of an opposite-sex body, lifelong medicalisation with drugs that cause their organs to atrophy inside the living body ....

Thank god, if they've been denied that future.

Well I just did a thumbs up on someone's post, and it now says, under the post on the reaction button, 'agree'.

I just got used to saying thank you!

at least 80% of children who feel this type of distress grow out of it without this life-altering medicalised pathway, that they are too young to comprehend anyway

So how many 'cis' (sorry!) children have had their reproductive function - and general health - damaged irreparably (in addition to the 'trans' children who endured side effects they could have been spared if they waited to 'transition' in adulthood)?

That's a price worth paying is it @ButterflyHatched ? Your utter callousness is enraging.

Many people go through life with undiagnosed ADHD or autism. Many people, particularly girls, mask so no one actually realises they have autism. They copy the popular girls, so no one sees the signs. Many people with ADHD don't get diagnosed in childhood, they are the naughty ones who are often written off in life.
So, yes, people with autism or ADHD are likely to think they are 'born in the wrong body' because they and their needs have ignored.

What are 'actual trans people'?

Nobody is literally born in the wrong body, so there are no 'actual trans people', are there?

Love your hyperbole 🦋

You are aware that an autism (or ADHD, or any other similar neurotype) diagnosis would have generally excluded you from treatment as a member of this cohort, right?

As in, it is literally impossible for the older stats to reflect the neurodiversity of trans people because almost no neurodiverse trans people were allowed to get a diagnosis.

You'd just get blocked from even starting the discussion from the outset. I know several people who that happened to.

Ableism and transphobia go hand in hand, always.

Agreed!

He deserves an OBE

I think the thumbs up is the old thanks, and the clap is something like 'we'll done/good point we'll made'.

Prof Bell was one of my university lecturers, some time ago now. Thorough, pragmatic, happy to teach and speak to anyone. I’m not surprised by his profile now.

What does the clapping mean? Is it well done? That's what I thought it meant, but now it looks like it's thanks?

If not, what do we do if you just want to say thanks, now?

At 15 she had OCD, anxiety, anorexia and had suicidal thoughts. She thought she was fat and ugly. She started to think she would be better off as a boy, was referred to a gender therapist and, voila, she was given hormones and later had a mastectomy.

It's insane. Every time I think about it. You have actual clinicians telling children that they can have body parts cut off which will help them believe they're opposite sex.

It's absolutely La La Land. There is nothing a girl can do to be a boy. Absolutely nothing. And vice versa. No man will ever have the smallest clue how it feels to inhabit the body of a woman.

I'm reminded of India Willoughby on Big Brother, totally topless and rubbing moisturiser into their chest, complete with silicone implants. Rubbing it in a way a woman never would. And saying, I don't feel a thing. Nothing.

Because it's a man's chest.

A man's chest with silicone implants. There's not a woman on the planet who knows what it feels like to be a man with silicone implants.

The inhumanity of doctors telling confused, mentally ill 15-year-old girls that they can turn them into as good a boy as they need to be, will never stop shocking me.

We get bogged down, sometimes, in the discourse on this site. Especially with madly hyperbolic posts like those of butters claiming whistleblower are destroying children's lives. Where there is an attempt to wrench the Overton window from one end of the building to another building entirely, down the end of the street.

But telling confused girls they can be boys and then cutting their breasts off to prove it, is and will never stop being, insane.

His focus is children and he's been been a powerful advocate for them. He's one of the reasons the corruption and bad practice at GIDs was revealed. Not surprising that extreme transactivists don't like him.

True. It's better children have adults who do this than those who push gender ideology

I am wondering where @ButterflyHatched (and other activists who are trans) argue as they do and act as they do because they have been hormonally affected brain-wise? One of the videos I watched linked from this site (cannot recall details right now of who was speaking) was about the effect on the brain of blocking puberty . And the role of hormones on maturing how we think as we grow into adults.

This article makes points about brains and how they mature and how that affects decision making. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-adolescent-brain-beyond-raging-hormones

If you have no puberty then do you remain a raging, intolerant teenager in your thoughts and never become mature? (The article is from 2005 so pre this debate but the speaker in the video was someone who looked into puberty blockers because she was amazed that they were seen as having no effect (time to think. totally reversible).

This is not an attack on @ButterflyHatched who I think did got through puberty. But its a reflection on how we may have entrenched thinking and behaviour from those that did use puberty blockers. Its one of the terrifying things - counts as worse to me than the physical problems of detransition. Its a trap without escape (you won't realise you are trapped).