AIBU about transgender person taking legal action against NHS for allowing her to transition? [[title edited by MNHQ on OP's behalf]]

[HollyGoLoudly1]

A 23 year old is taking legal action against the NHS for giving her treatment to transition to male as a teenager. She has since decided to live as a female and is taking legal action against the NHS as they should have 'challenged her' more when she wanted to transition rather than giving her the treatment.

The NHS can't do right for doing wrong here. Cash strapped to the point of collapse and being sued for giving someone the treatment they asked for. I despair.

AIBU or is this absolutely ludicrous?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51676020
from MNHQ - this title and OP originally said the person concerned was suing the NHS. They are in fact just taking legal action. The OP has asked us to make this clear but you may find some of the early posts reflect the words in the original title

You can’t assess what you are getting into if nobody is allowed to question your viewpoint and present a challenge.

Exactly. Look at how comprehensively and aggressively people who object to the idea that you can change sex are shut down. Teachers, social workers, academics, doctors, charity workers, politicians are all called bigots and have activists trying to get them fired from their jobs and banned on social media for challenging this ideology. This is a failure of all our public institutions, not just the NHS, and an object lesson in how easy it is for them to be captured by lobby groups.

What the fuck is wrong with providing talking therapy to the young so that they can explore the problem of sexualised identity. When I was a teen, we were all worried about growing up because of the way men treated women. My bf's mum was repeatedly raped by her h but this was just what husband's could do within the law. Every Friday night.

We had to be careful what clothes we wore because if some bloke decided that he liked your legs or your boobs then he could help himself and the judge - if you bothered - would say you were asking for it. Believe that, it happened and it informed all our behaviour. If I'd thought of transitioning back in the 60s then I would probably have tried. But back then, lesbians got raped - conversion therapy, and every shit little bloke who couldn't get it another way was happy to take it that way, and did. Lesbians just need a good bit of dick and they'd change their minds when they knew what they were missing.....

And so on.

It is no wonder girls are confused about their sexuality as they approach puberty. Boys are too, but tend to dick-swing more. It has always been thus. I thought we were getting somewhere come the 70s. I thought my dd would grow up in a better world for women. But no, in many ways it's worse now.

Don't touch kids irreversibly until they're of age, and preferably not even then. Do the counselling first. Do it for a few years.

But that's the thing-it's not clear that she wanted to be the opposite sex or was just musing because she didn't seem to fit in & was one of the few girls to wear trousers to school.

Sunday Times today:
(extract)
"Bell was depressed as a teenager and asked to be called by a boy’s name at school. Her GP referred her to the gender identity clinic. “From then on everything snowballed,” she said. “I was 16 when I had my first appointment at the Tavistock . After a handful of appointments, I was taking puberty-blocking drugs.

“By the time I was 18, I was on cross-sex hormones. It was so quick. Then I got transferred to the adult gender identity service.”

After two appointments she was “referred for chest surgery” to remove her breasts. “From then on I was on my own. They did not keep tabs on me. I had no therapy. I was just living the way I thought was best.” She argues she should not have been given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, that children cannot give informed consent to such treatment, and that medical staff should have challenged her teenage view that she wanted to be a boy." (continues)

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/c59e5d0a-5af2-11ea-b224-188b67cae9b1?shareToken=10dd2b69b2843465658c6f7420a0663a

All parents & adults who are concerned for the welfare of children should consider how many professionals failed to challenge /were unable to challenge a depressed teenage girl's viewpoint & the consequences.

TheWordWomanIsTaken
I think you're right. Elements of this have men's sexual rights written all over it

I should have been clearer on the rhetorical nature of my question really, but it's astounding how there's been so much "be nice you nasty feminists... How dare you expect the definition of women to be the biological kind... No debate... Don't agree with us and you'll have the blood of suicidal children on your hands".

Maybe now the general public will start asking questions as to how a group of lobbyists (TRAs and MRAs) have managed to take over the struggles of genuine dysphoric transsexuals to a point where the battle ground is now mainly biologically adult men trampling on women's rights and placing children at risk.

A minor was ENCOURAGED to radically alter a healthy body through medication and surgery.

For any other personal struggle, a teen would have been treated with an appropriate combination of medication and therapy

"They gave her something they BELIEVED which she let them believe would better her life."
The minimum we should expect is evidence-based medicine. Not belief-based butchery.

The comparison between Gillick competence WRT contraception and puberty blockers is a false one.

The effectiveness and safety of contraceptives available on the NHS has been thoroughly researched and peer reviewed. The various drugs have been licensed for use as contraceptives. GPs are equipped to guide competent teenagers towards the medically safest decision.

Puberty blockers are off label cancer drugs that are used with extreme caution in cases of precocious puberty. There is no thorough peer-reviewed evidence base for the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria. Doctors cannot be expected to guide teenagers towards a safe decision.

Lobby groups tell parents that their child is at risk of dying by suicide if they watchfully wait. Thankfully the evidence says otherwise. But who can blame parents for being scared and agreeing to off label treatment?

Firelink: Surely she would have the brains to realise what she was getting into?

How was she supposed to know? Schools now teach this ideology. People are sacked for questioning it.

I wouldn’t have known, at 16, that a doctor would give me drugs that had never been tested for this use, nor that they should have done in-depth investigations and tests before starting me on a course that would cause irreversible damage. Nor that schools were teaching, as fact, the dogma of a well-funded ideology.

Who the hell would know, at 16? Even good parents are likely to believe people who present themselves as medical experts.

This girl is only one of thousands of children unknowingly enrolled in a massive experiment that’s playing with their lives.

I spent two years on these drugs and they have wrecked my health, and I was an adult when I was on them. I still haven’t recovered more than a decade later.

No one is making informed consent when they are not being given all of the information.

If you were given something commonly referred to as a “puberty blocker” but actually found out that it’s put you into menopause, damaged your bones, left you with longterm fertility and health issues, how would you feel?

Just google “lupron survivors” to read about the thousands of adult women whose lives have been destroyed by GnrH analogues. Then think about how ethical it is to give them to children, especially children with ASD, without ever challenging whether what they feel is really gender dysphoria or not.

The NHS should not be held responsible for this they do as they are told it's social services and her parents who should have sorted this is also think the nhsame should not pay for anyone to have a sex change problem solved

NHS aren't to blame her. Just trying to get some cash for her own mistake

@PixieDustt she is not suing anyone or trying to get money. She is asking for a review into how the system currently works, in an attempt to prevent more children in the future being allowed to make the same mistake. A mistake which will set them on a medical pathway for life costing the NHS a lot of money in the long run. If the review changes things, tax payer money/NHS money will be saved, so you I think you would be in favour of it.

YABVVU they’ve left her with life changing problems. If you went to your doctor feeling suicidal and he gave you a lethal dose of morphine shouldn’t your estate and dependants be able to sue?

The NHS should not be held responsible for this they do as they are told it's social services and her parents who should have sorted this

An NHS department is of course responsible for the medical treatments they prescribe to children & vulnerable adults.

What have Social Services got to do with this?

Some of the comments here are not accruate.

She was given 'puberty blockers' at the age of 16 to delay some signs of puberty until she decided what she wanted to do. Those drugs wear off, they are not a permanent thing that will change your sex. They are given to delay certain aspects of male/female puberty only.

She was 17, almost 18 years old when she was given testosterone. So this was over a year after the puberty blockers were given.

She had her breads removed at age 20.

So no, she wasn't 15/16 years old and given 'sex change' drugs, pumped with testosterone and had her breasts cut off. It was a 4 year process with 1-2 years between each treatment with plenty of time to decide and she wasn't a child for any of it.

She made a choice, over the course of 4 years and as an adult so I don't think the NHS are to blame. Her argument is that she only had 3 therapy sessions before the puberty blockers but they were not any part of the transition. They were simply given to give her some time to think about what she really wanted (the correct thing to do) then it was a good while later that they actually did anything to begin changing her gender.

She will have a hard time convincing anyone that she was duped or felt forced for over 4 years by a huge amount of different NHS staff. Imagine if a girl that was given the pill for example at 16 years old went and sued the NHS because it changed the way aber body works and she was 'only' given 3 sessions of therapy beforehand. At the end of the day, girls are handed hormone suppressors and all sorts from age 13 and none are ever classed as being vulnerable and not having enough support to decide. She was 16 and given puberty blockers, not a sex change. She was 20 before anything really drastic took place.

The NHS should not be held responsible for this

This particular part of the NHS appears to have gone rogue. If the judge in this review rules the law has been broken by prescribing powerful cancer drugs to kid who don’t have cancer, then yes, of course the NHS must be held responsible.

I love the NHS, it saved my little girls life, but this part isn’t following the same rule book.

@Mrschainsawuk
Human beings cannot change sex. It's not possible and it's a cruel lie to pretend that they can.
She shouldn't have been given unlicensed drugs or been encouraged to have a double mastectomy.

This is what lots of us have said for a few years, so woke it's now wrong.

Not ludicrous at all. Children should not be encouraged to medically transition, either via drugs or surgery.

They are given to delay certain aspects of male/female puberty only.

They are designed for prostate cancer and not licensed for gender related medicine.

Good. Perhaps the more often this starts happening the less inclined they might be to start chopping bits off willy nilly (pun intended).

The NHS should not be held responsible for this they do as they are told it's social services and her parents who should have sorted this is also think the nhsame should not pay for anyone to have a sex change problem solved

No doctor should EVER give a treatment, esp one that is so life changing, unless they know this is the right course of action.
There has been many people already highlighted the fact that young teenagers are given the go ahead for hormones and/or surgery wo proper psychology assessment for example.
There has been a strong push for those professional to just accept that when a young person says they feel like x gender then that’s what it is, no question asked.

I am very happy to see an inquest into how those services are working and whether they do actually proper.y care for their patients.
I also think that We have a very courageous woman there. People who detransition are often vilified so she will get sone flake from many sides (The trans community, people who says she chose what she had etc etc). Plus she is a woman of course so that will not play in her favour either....

So those who think the NHS did nothing wrong here, are you pro-powerful untested drugs for any under 18s, under any circumstances? No age limits at all?
Do you not think mental health therapy would be a better first option?

March 2019 article by Prof Michael Biggs (Oxford University)
'Tavistock’s Experimentation with Puberty Blockers: Scrutinizing the Evidence'
(extract)
"In 2010, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) launched a trial of puberty blockers for children in their early teens with gender dysphoria. This was—and remains—an experimental treatment. These drugs, Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone agonists (GnRHa), have not been certified as a safe or effective treatment for gender dysphoria by their manufacturers, nor by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.

The Director of GIDS, Polly Carmichael, was keenly aware of the controversy over these drugs. ‘The question is, if you halt your own sex hormones so that your brain is not experiencing puberty, are you in some way altering the course of nature?’ (Guardian, 14 August 2008). ‘[T]he debate revolves around the reversibility of this intervention—physical and also psychological, in terms of the possible influence of sex hormones on brain and identity development’ (Carmichael and Davidson 2009). Before 2010, GIDS administered blockers to children only when they reached 16; this is the age at which young people have the presumptive capacity to consent to medical treatment.

This cautious approach was vociferously opposed by two organizations devoted to transgendering of children, Mermaids and the Gender Identity Research and Education Society. As Carmichael later recounted: ‘There was a lot of pressure coming from certain group [sic] to introduce it—families were travelling abroad because they knew it was available in Holland and America. As a service, we didn’t have the evidence one way or the other, so the best way to do it was as part of a research study’ (Vice, 16 November 2016).

Tavistock Trust announced the study on its website in April 2011. It stated that GnRHa treatment ‘is deemed reversible’. This assertion contradicted the study’s own research protocol (which I obtained under Freedom of Information from the NHS Health Research Authority). ‘It is not clear [my emphasis] what the long term effects of early suppression may be on bone development, height, sex organ development, and body shape and their reversibility if treatment is stopped during pubertal development’ (Early Pubertal Suppression in a Carefully Selected Group of Adolescents with Gender Identity Disorder, 4 November 2010, Research Ethics Committee number 10/H0713/79). A paediatrician on the study team, Russell Viner, frankly acknowledged the risks. ‘If you suppress puberty for three years the bones do not get any stronger at a time when they should be, and we really don’t know what suppressing puberty does to your brain development. We are dealing with unknowns’ (Daily Mail, 25 February 2012)." (continues)

www.transgendertrend.com/tavistock-experiment-puberty-blockers/

I hope she's successful. The NHS needs to stop presenting surgery as a 'cure' for gender dysphoria. The suicidal outcomes are exactly the same whether a transperson has surgery or not. The medications have not been subject to rigorous long-term testing as a puberty blocker. Basically, these children and teens have been used as guinea pigs without the NHS explaining the outcomes, without exploring their diagnosis of dysphoria thoroughly, without counselling them on the possible physical outcomes and without taking into account their co-morbid conditions.
I have no problem at all with any of my taxes being used to show what a bloody disgrace this has been. I'd much rather my taxes were used to shine a light on this problem than they were used to perform amputations on healthy teens (or adults) or promote giving DCs untested drugs.

NHS organisations have big questions to answer on this. It’s good that they have been legally challenged.

Mental health services availability is a joke too, and sadly most people negatively affected are not in circumstances able to litigate on that.