AIBU to think this became a political issue where children are just pawns?

[EerieSilence]

I read the news regarding Hillary Cass's report and I'm horrified as to how political the debate has become, with nobody looking at the real issue, which is providing treatments to vulnerable children before they're mature enough in the name of progress.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/10/thousands-of-children-unsure-of-gender-identity-let-down-by-nhs-report-finds

So far, I can only find comments which are very divisive. It's either the feeling that it's an attack of the transgender community or the conservatives celebrating it as their proof that the wokism should be over.

The uncritical support of gender transformations has let many people down, in my opinion and damaged the transgender debate more than any conservative could have done. At the expense of confused minors who became pawns in the big battle of the gender.
And yes, I'm ready to be roasted here. I'm not transgender-phobic and I fully support transformations where they really are valid and the person who's having it done is fully aware of the consequences.

That’s not true Stormy. I think you are missing the point. I agree that much more financial resource needs to go into MH care for young people in general (including those with gender distress) but due diligence is required to uphold safeguarding requirements.

Is it that you just want to talk about mental health services for children and you don't want to talk about children who have been told they are trans because you feel that the trans issue is clouding other things?

I'm sorry I'm really struggling to understand what you are aiming for here. Have you actually read the Cass report?

cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/

Here is the actual Cass Review for anyone who wants to read it for themselves.

I don't think you understand just how many powerful people - often males - still are holding strong to their unscientific ideological beliefs that children's distress should be medicalised and psychological support vetoed. It's not possible to focus on quality mental health provision without acknowledging that the dire state of services is not just about the quantity, it's also about what they do with the resources they do have. If we do not discuss this, the actively damaging treatments will continue and parents will continue to be mislead by being lied to about the suicide stats etc. Critiquing harmful gender ideology is an essential part of improving mental health provision. More is not more if that more is used to do more of what is actively harmful.

But if the focus just continuously stays on gender ideology which absolutely does happen on these threads alienating vast numbers the hugely important issue of MH provision just gets side stepped or completely forgotten.

I’m angry at the focus and discussion being taken up with ideology at this time.

Aren't we bloody all. It really shouldn't have needed the Cass report to get changes or see obviously problems or the huge push to even get that done.

Unfortunately groups and individual who pushed to ignore the other mental health issue thees kid had are still out there and may well target the new services being set up.

Personally with an lesbian ASD teen girl all this gender pushing has been a constant background worry that well meaning professionals or friends will convivence her gender was an issue for her and cause her untold long term harm - finger crossed we do seem to have avoided that.

You can't be surprised that people want to talk about a report that only came out yesterday, though?

I don't think you can separate the two things.

One of the major findings of Cass is that the majority of these gender distressed children have other mental health comorbidities which simply aren't being addressed. The NHS doesn't have the capacity to properly assess and treat them for their autism, or their ADHD, or their history of sexual abuse, so the moment they suggest they might be trans they are just shunted onto a gender identity clinic waiting list and their other issues are left unaddressed.

How many of these children could have been spared from further harm if their HCPs had said, "You're not a boy, you're a girl with autism and we're going to help you navigate that"?

To return to OP’s question. I don’t think this has been enough of a political issue at all frankly. Parties of all colours have completely ignored the appalling state of children’s care. It was the NHS who commissioned the report independently and our disgraceful self serving politicians have largely sidestepped all accountability. Barring a very brave few.

"People have been campaigning for them to get that support,. They could never get it if they were funnelled out of MH services and into GIDs. Which they were being. We were not campaigning from an ideological position, but from one that had at its heart the basic principles of health care and an evidence base."

"One of the major findings of Cass is that the majority of these gender distressed children have other mental health comorbidities which simply aren't being addressed. The NHS doesn't have the capacity to properly assess and treat them for their autism, or their ADHD, or their history of sexual abuse, so the moment they suggest they might be trans they are just shunted onto a gender identity clinic waiting list and their other issues are left unaddressed.

How many of these children could have been spared from further harm if their HCPs had said, "You're not a boy, you're a girl with autism and we're going to help you navigate that"

Thank you.👏👏

I think Stormy may be getting confused when she/ he talks about ‘ideology’- as if there is ‘ideology’ on both sides with regards to this issue.
In my opinion one side is about ideology (eg: affirmative medical pathways will ‘cure’ children with gender distress, kids are what they say they are) and the other isn’t (let's provide holistic assessment and treatment and ensure distressed children are not rushed into a potentially damaging and irreversible medical pathway).

I don't think you can separate the two things.

This is it. It’s like being asked to discuss the price of fish. Without referring to the fishing industry or mentioning the sea.

Everytime women raised the issue of how children were diagnosed and treated they were shouted down for being bigots and wanting trans kids to commit suicide. They have been on the receiving end of threats to themselves and their livelihoods and that is not an exaggeration unfortunately. I don’t think many people understand how appallingly trans activist have behaved, the calls for violence against women are routinely ignored by everyone.

Women have been yelling loudly about this for a while they will be across the political spectrum. Many women leading on this have been primarily from the left and good chunk of right wing women went argh what the fuck is going on. Both are concerned about sex based rights and kids being damaged.

The problem really is that we are in a situation where our actual national health service treated children with protocols which are risky and highly controversial when the science isn’t settled. How did that happen. How did clinical staff decide to ignore co-morbidities and just decide to affirm gender and start children on Pb with no hard clinical evidence of the impact on those kids. That to me is extremely political. How did a small group manage to infect our institutions to the extent that children were basically being used as guinea pigs and few people within those institutions said anything.

We should be asking some very hard questions about how people who were telling the truth were silenced either through disciplinary procedures, social disapproval, sackings etc. When did we become a society that is so scared of discussing the truth and looking at evidence. GIDS clinical staff who did whistleblow did it YEARS ago, this has been going on for YEARS.

The WPATH files actually shocked me, they fucking knew exactly what they were doing.

Gender distressed children have been deliberately denied the following:

-evidence based Medicine
-best clinical practice
-child safeguarding
-rigorous and regular data reviews

All for ideological reasons. Of course we should discuss how such a pernicious ideology took hold amongst healthcare professionals, and how it's perpetuated throughout society. How can we be confident that mental health services aren't also going to be poisoned in the same way?

"But if the focus just continuously stays on gender ideology which absolutely does happen on these threads alienating vast numbers the hugely important issue of MH provision just gets side stepped or completely forgotten."

This is a thread about the Cass Review - a report about gender ideology and how it has affected vulnerable children.

That is the focus of the thread. You can start your own thread about children's mental health support, not berate women here for discussing the topic of the thread.

I agree that the debate has become so divisive now. It’s a really complex issue and both sides have some really valid points and both sides are guilty of entering the debate with unnecessary aggression.

I am a feminist and object to the current situation with people born male, with male genitalia, male skewed hormones, higher rates of violent and sexually violent behaviours and stronger bodies, being allowed into women only spaces and sports.

I also care about people’s right to be fully accepted and respected no matter what their sex/gender/identity or any other personal attribute.

I also know that the various complex factors that make up your sex/gender are on continuum and fluctuate. With the exception of chromosomes (mostly) of course. And that there have always been people that don’t fit the binary model, because it isn’t binary really. We’ve just made it so.

I also can see that earlier treatment, if you have definitely been assigned the wrong gender/sex is better than leaving it longer and that you can’t give proper informed consent until you are fully competent. So a massive clinical dilemma.

Also that adolescence is naturally a period where we try different identities to see what fits, so it’s very hard to unpick what is that process and what is genuinely a wrongly assigned gender and the risk of significant harm if that is wrongly judged.

I like the idea of treating people as individuals without making any pre judged assumptions. My nieces and their friends are all different in terms of sexuality, gender identity and some identify differently to their assigned sex. They all seem to treat each other very respectfully and are really accepting and celebratory of difference. I really like all that.

But I also like the sense of belonging I get from being with other women who have had similar experiences to me because we are women. We have had similar experiences of discrimination, health etc. I like women only spaces as there is more space to express myself than if men are present. I identify as a woman and don’t want to be relabelled as a cis woman.

And that’s just the tip of this very complex, thorny issue to which there is not an easy and quick answer. It’s a bloody mess and I don’t think anyone has the answers.

The previous binary status quo leaves those non binary or mis- gendered people with a sense of being ‘othered’ and not accepted. I don’t like that.

Self identification and calling trans women, women leaves me feeling invalidated in my identity as a woman, puts women at risk and puts us in situations where we are once again facing a battle to matter as much as men, even if said ‘men’ identify as women.

Aaargh!!!

Yes. And, this is an emerging area of research so there has to be some practice based evidence too. I haven’t read the report but do know that when you are working in an emerging field, practice based evidence is particularly important. Governance should still present and robust though.

Sex is binary. There are some specific medical conditions where an individual may have biological attributes of both sexes, but these are pretty rare. In the vast VAST majority of humans sex is binary. This should not be up for debate and the fact that it is is quite frightening.

Dislike the false equivalence about the ‘sides’.

Sex is binary though.

Even people with rare disorders of sexual development are either male or female, but have still been weaponised by trans activists claiming that their existence means sex isn't binary anyway so what does it matter if a biological male believes he and his cock should be allowed to use the women's communal showers down at the local pool.

Nobody's sex is assigned at birth. It is fixed at conception and usually clearly visible on ultrasound from the 2nd trimester of pregnancy onwards.

As for gender, gender is just a load of stereotypes. Gender is what made my mum's friend take the cute little baby grow she'd bought back to JoJo Maman Bébé and buy a pink dress instead after she found out I'd had a girl because she doesn't have any granddaughters herself and just couldn't stop herself. (The dress was very sweet but my daughter would have got more wear out of the baby grow.)

Defining women as people who wear dresses rather than people who have female bodies seems completely regressive to me. Isn't that precisely what feminists are supposed to be fighting against? Some women wear trousers and ride into battle, not Joan of Arc must have identified as a man because she wore trousers and rode into battle.

As for non binary, by attempting to position yourself outside binary gender stereotypes, you're defining everyone else as people who conform to those stereotypes, whether they agree or not. Identifying as non binary suggests that you see everyone else as conformist and two dimensional.

Most of what you are saying in your post is really quite "terfy". If you believe women should be entitled to single sex spaces for their own safety and dignity, you don't like being called "cis" and you think doctors should exercise caution before allowing vulnerable young people to medically transition, that is enough to make you a big old transphobe in many people's eyes. So there's really no point trying to be diplomatic if really you think it's all a load of nonsense. The more people come out and say it, the sooner we can close this chapter and move on.

I don't think that's a fair criticism. People are talking about both issues and there's a lot of concern voiced about how bigoted the Labour Party are now not least because they are the party who one hopes would actually properly fund our health services. Talking about the damage gender ideology has done does not mean we are neglecting there broader context of children's needs but if we veto talking about a damaging ideology we are causing harm.

@Emotionalsupportsnail

"I also know that the various complex factors that make up your sex/gender are on continuum and fluctuate. With the exception of chromosomes (mostly) of course. And that there have always been people that don’t fit the binary model, because it isn’t binary really. We’ve just made it so.

I also can see that earlier treatment, if you have definitely been assigned the wrong gender/sex is better than leaving it longer and that you can’t give proper informed consent until you are fully competent. So a massive clinical dilemma."

No.* *Please stop spreading disinformation. Sex is not on a continuum and does not fluctuate. The model of sex is binary. There is male and female. Large gametes and small gametes. There is no such thing as intersex. Some people have differences of sex development but they are still either male of female. Sex is not assigned. It is observable in utero and at birth. People cannot change sex.

You can argue about what gender is because it is a social construct, mainly described by harmful stereotypes. Gender ideology relies on these regressive harmful stereotypes eg my 4 yo boy likes playing with Barbies and glitter so he must actually be a girl. We need to let children be gender non-conforming. A boy wearing a dress and playing with barbies is still a boy. A girl who likes playing with cars, has short hair and wants to be a mechanic is still a girl.

We are all non-binary as no one (or very few people) conforms to rigid gender stereotypes. In my opinion gender identity just means your personality. If your personality doesn't conform to your gender stereotype that doesn't mean you have a different gender.

I'll add as well that we need tot talk about gender ideology because it harms not just children but also women. To say we can't talk about an ideology which has dismantled women's single sex rape support spaces, for example, because we should only talk about children's mental health provision, is not reasonable. A root cause of a lot of current harm is gender ideology.

@St0rmyDay555 one of the things that would have helped children (and adults) is accurate data collection and analysis. A lot of GC people, including me, have been arguing for a very long time about the importance of accurate data collection . Data is seen as boring, but it is absolutely crucial in helping develop the right support for gender questioning children, changing laws etc.

This is a link https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/official-report/search-what-was-said-in-parliament/chamber-and-committees/official-report/what-was-said-in-parliament/ehrcj-21-06-2022?meeting=13837&iob=125452 to Professor Alice Sullivan evidence to the Scottish Government Gender Reform Committee.

Sadly, as Dr Cass found, data collection has been very poor. Data was withheld by the NHS from Dr Cass - why. The Health Minister actually created new legislation to help facilitate the sharing of this crucial data. Why then did the clinics refuse to hand it over? What did it show or not show?

A huge amount of harm has been done to children by those who failed to support those of us asking for accurate data collection. Why was accurate data collection a problem? A) because it starts with sex recorded at birth and so was automatically dismissed as transphobic and B) TRAs were concerned it might not support their beliefs.

I learned in my undergraduate degree in the 90s that actually it’s not that clear cut. It’s generally true but the human body is incredibly complex.

Chromosomes are the most binary aspect but even genitalia can be more masculine and more feminine. We all start out with same bits in the womb. Generally speaking genitalia are fairly clearly one or the other but it’s not completely binary. Sex hormones certainly aren’t binary.

Historically we have always had people that don’t fully fit the traditional binary structure - Tom boys, effeminate men - but mostly society has created a situation where people try to fit into the binary system.

I like that there is more freedom of self expression. But like I say, I don’t like a lot of what has come with that and the aggression with which that’s been pursued. I’m really not happy about women only spaces being compromised and the issues in women only sports.