Webberly Vs Joyce

Hosgecast on Webberly: she has a marketing and pr person

https://open.substack.com/pub/thehodgecast/p/my-thoughts-on-the-gender-debate?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Yeah, US drug advertising to consumers "tell your HCP you need Magic Pillz!" is obscene. See also, Goldacre's Bad Pharma.

Exactly - there's got to be a statistical basis underpinning medicine. I'm so tired of black and white thinking nowadays, but HW's playing into this tendency.

The article's really interesting - just got more into it. It's thought-provoking to apply some of the other trends it discusses to GI "care", too - like US health capitalism, and how self-diagnosis on the internet is distorting live consultations.

5 children. 4 boys and a girl. She has taught her daughter that she shouldn't be afraid of men.

A good corrective to the idea that EBM brought losses to medical practice is Ben Goldacre's Bad Medicine. Whatever relational or intuitive prowess a Dr may or may not have, the absolute minimum we should expect of them is that they confine themselves to treatments that don't just exploit the placebo effect (the nocebo effect is just as real, after all) but can be shown to actually work.
If we don't do that then we're back to radium underpants.

Apologies for not having read much of the rest of the thread - was just there listening live - but rabbit-holing off an AIBU thread about AI, came across this. A pithy summary of evidence based medicine, it really does highlight the scary absurdity of HW's comment about statistics (24 hours on, I remember it as something like, "I can't think of any other medical condition in which statistics are permitted to limit or withhold treatment"?!)

...evidence-based medicine (EBM). Emerging in the 1990s with the unassailable goal of improving care, EBM challenged practices based on habit and tradition by insisting decisions be grounded in rigorous research, ideally randomized controlled trials. First championed at McMaster University by physicians David Sackett and Gordon Guyatt, EBM quickly hardened into orthodoxy, embedded in curricula, accreditation standards and performance metrics that reshaped clinical judgment into compliance with statistical averages and confidence intervals. The gains were real: effective therapies spread faster, outdated ones were abandoned, and an ethic of scientific accountability took hold...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/09/healthcare-artificial-intelligence-ai

It's even more interesting in that the article (have only skimmed) then shifts into what we lost with EBM / its limitations, and this is, I think, in part what HW has monetised and exploits in the interview - a post-truth cynicism about facts plus materialist individualism... So she becomes the superior expert in that she recognises (thanks to her Zeitgeisty medical expertise) that feeling is paramount and HJ's dry stats just can't match up.

My bold.

But as the model transformed medicine, it narrowed the scope of clinical encounters. The messy, relational and interpretive dimensions of care – the ways physicians listen, intuit and elicit what patients may not initially say – were increasingly seen as secondary to standardized protocols. Doctors came to treat not singular people but data points. Under pressure for efficiency, EBM ossified into an ideology: “best practices” became whatever could be measured, tabulated and reimbursed. The complexity of patients’ lives was crowded out by metrics, checkboxes and algorithms. What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers.

You could apply the last sentence to HW's brand: What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers feeling.

I found this really frustrating to listen to. Not because of Helen Joyce, I think she argued the case well, but because of how the other Helen refused to answer direct questions and kept deflecting, and in many instances denied well documents facts, and made claims that were categorically false. And she’s one of the few TRAs actually willing to have a conversation!

Webberly has just been on Heretics with Andrew Gold. He tells her he knows she's a 'good person' and she seems to react well to that and tell him quite a lot! Think she says she has 4 children. He does push back on (I think) all the mad things she says but finds enough agreement/common ground so that the conversation can carry on 'agreably'.
I think he does well in getting a lot of sunlight - she seemed more relaxed with him and said some quite weird things (like she'd hate to have a willy but if she did she'd play with it all day!?!)

And date when it comes through

Is the Webberley/Joyce debate available on any podcasts does anyone know? I'd like to listen to it on my commute.

Archived 6 months ago here
https://archive.ph/tFmog

Is he actually a dolphin, or does he just identify as one?

Maybe they have, there are trans-identified medics. One example; Dr. Esben ‘Esther Pirelli’ Benestad, once Norway's top gender quack, is a trans-identified male. He spent several years being investigated, censured then allowed to practice only under supervision, but his delight in transgression could not be contained & in 2023 he permanently lost his medical licence. The Norwegian health authority specified, “unfit to practice responsibly due to a substantial lack of professional insight, irresponsible activity, and substantial breaches of duty.” That included prescribing gendermeds far outside Norwegian regulations.

Our problem in the UK is that the medical schools & junior Dr ranks now have a bulge of genderspecial people of sundry flags, & the BMA is now led by the gender crank Tom Dolphin, who, as a gay man & an anaesthetist, really ought to know better than to fall for anti-science fads.

Well, at least they're asking for medically qualified doctors and not demanding the right to prescribe for themselves and be trained to carry out their own surgery.

https://www.tumblr.com/edinburghath/163521055802/trans-health-manifesto

It'll be a sad day when that link finally ceases to work. Is it archived?

The posts on there! "Nobody ever talks about cis peoples' 'gender identity'" what?! Yes they do, all the time! I remember when it was the first thing a trans person would "challenge you to think about" if you're a person who doesn't strongly wish to be the opposite sex.

Some insist that they have doctors who are trans and to remove regulated prescribing from f cross sex hormones!

TRAs / trans - "we want doctors who do what we want"

[Doctor does what they want ]

TRAs / trans - "we want doctors who do what we want and don't speak to transpobes"

She got chided last month there for posting AI-generated questions at them and for GenderGP being rubbish: https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1olpob2/what_does_this_tribunal_really_mean_for_trans/

Looks like a lot of them are really fed up with her.

It does, but where on earth would you begin?

Is this the first c* where the members show us their thinking in real time?

Cult deprogramming needs to happen in a big way.

Thanks @nicepotoftea for the details about the sketchy money making.

I’d add that for psychopathic people being rich is just a partial motivation. Full satisfaction only comes from gaining wealth through nefarious means: defrauding, swindling, cheating, playing the system in some way.

Particularly delicious if at the same time your activities can be spun as ‘kindness, helping or saving people’ while actually being entirely destructive.

Isn't it funny seeing them describe sex realist people concerned about safeguarding as "being in a cult"? That topsy turvy world where words mean whatever you want them to mean.

Those comments on reddit show the posters' dishonesty - it's like they can't help it!
"canal street in Manchester is basically straight street" how on earth are they discerning this? Seeing male-female couples who could have the same gender identities?!

Lots saying similar to "Helen’s background in genderGP is questionable". I wonder if there would be anyone who would actually say things that every trans person (including agender people etc) would agree with?

Interestingly the TRAs hate Webberly - https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1p44jhr/helen_joyce_telegraph_debate/

Yes, you may be right (hopefully). I think there's may have been an initial period, before the recent successful challeneges, where a lot of YP were all taking it as gospel, but I hope very much you're right and the tide is turning back to common sense.