Transgender Documentary on BBC2 Thursday 2100 "Transgender Kids: Who Knows best?"

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Looks like an interesting watch, that does not just accept the trans children or they will kill themselves rhetoric. I just hope the BBC actually do show it and aren't bullied into not showing it.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b088kxbw

The blurb:

Around the world there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to gender clinics - boys saying they want to be girls and vice versa. Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a 'gender affirmative' approach - fully supporting their children's change of identity. But is this approach right?

In this challenging documentary, BBC Two's award-winning This World strand travels to Canada, where one of the world's leading experts in childhood gender dysphoria (the condition where children are unhappy with their biological sex) lost his job for challenging the new orthodoxy that children know best. Speaking on TV for the first time since his clinic was closed, Dr Kenneth Zucker believes he is a victim of the politicisation of transgender issues. The film presents evidence that most children with gender dysphoria eventually overcome the feelings without transitioning and questions the science behind the idea that a boy could somehow be born with a 'female brain' or vice versa. It also features 'Lou' - who was born female and had a double mastectomy as part of transitioning to a man. She now says it is a decision that 'haunts' her and feels that her gender dysphoria should have been treated as a mental health issue.

Cocoa - That would actually be an excellent point to make on Jess' thread: how can we meaningfully measure women's equality and progress when the meaning of 'woman' has become porous and statistics are not capturing this 'porosity' (for want of a better word)?

It does say 'or anything else that takes your fancy' in the webchat OP. I see the Trans agenda as a huge threat to women, including women in work, so I want to ask about it.

It does say 'or anything else that takes your fancy' in the webchat OP. I see the Trans agenda as a huge threat to women, including women in work, so I want to ask about it

YY, unless you define "women" or "woman" anything to do with women is meaningless.

I will post on the Web chat.

There are so many aspects of this that I'm not sure what to ask though.

There's the aspect of being dropped from counselling if your child doesn't take blockers, the misinformation, the pushing of the agenda in schools against the interests of all the children, including the transgender ones.

What do you think would be most helpful to ask?

Thank you, Fish.

I think you should post about being dropped from counselling if your child doesn't take blockers. None of the rest of us can talk about that.

Fish
I think should make them aware you are not getting any support for your child simply because you do not accept that the only solution is blockers and hormones. Hopefully because of your experiences, they will not fob you off and call you transphobic the way women generally are when they try to discuss this. Good luck and

Brilliant fish. Letting them know your unique perspective will be so helpful.

The arrogance and lack of responsibility from doctors which you mentioned up thread is so disturbing:

I was discouraged from googling about it as there is so much misinformation on the internet that I may end up scaring myself.

They wouldn't tell you the name of the drug in case you did some research and found out something 'scary'. It's indefensible. If you had concerns, like any normal person, you would go back and have them addressed. Why the secrecy?

God, it IS bloody scary.

Fish, your situation seriously upsets me, to the point that I often have tears in my eyes just reading your posts. Its all so wrong, and its scary that noone is allowed to say this or question the current 'treatment' without being shouted down as transphobic by those unwilling to actually listen. Just how far will this go. How many children are fine to be sacrificed at the altar of trans...the desistance rate is alarming, and NO collateral damage is ok IMO.

I hope you and your child find some kind of peace soon.

How is it legal not to provide patients with all the information and risks? Isn't that part of the Hippocratic Oath?

Even paracetamol comes with a whole host of warnings.

Albadross I don't know if they would have provided additional information after saying yes to the blockers. I'm not sure what happens after you say yes to them.

I'll go and put a question on the Web chat. It will be interesting to see what they say.

If they even know about the process, it's not very well discussed as far as I can tell.

I'm pretty hesitant to talk about it too much but I'm not on social media or anything so can't really be targeted by TAs or anything.

£100 on all trans-related questions being ignored. Ala Corbyn

Wanking The situation with your dsd is awful too, I really hope it gets resolved quickly.

I find it so upsetting that people are jumping on the band wagon of those with genuine issues to intimidate and hurt girls and women.

I can't believe that in 2017 being inclusive means no mental health help, no sex segregated spaces, and women being pushed back hundreds of years to having no rights again.

She won't ignore, WM, not her style. But I reckon she'll say the people posing the questions are transphobic bigots. Personally I can't even be bothered to post, not after her response to the sexual assaults in Cologne last year ("just like Birmingham New Street on a Saturday night" ffs).

Oh she's been asked about that too het!

Penny to a pound says her response will be that asking about Cologne makes you a racist bigot. I suspect she has a lot of adjectives handy to attach to the word bigot.

I don't know how she can call fish a bigot though. Without looking like a complete prat.

Well, that would be what one would hope, Datun, but I'd predict what she'll do is pick up on one of the other gender critical posters, call them a bigot, then completely ignore Fish.

Fish - you must have gone to hell and back.

I finally got around to watching the documentary today on the link kindly provided above:

archive.org/details/BBC-trans-kids

Anything I'd want to say has already been said. However, what strikes me is when we read of the scandals of the past we think "but how could this have go on? why were people willing to turn a blind eye? why did no one listen to the victims? why did the authorities not act?" and it seems incomprehensible. Well, just look around and marvel that it doesn't actually require a conspiracy for a scandal to be ignored while it's in full flow.

Datun someone on the girl guide thread the other day was questioning me about my views and then threw out a general bigot and transphobe comment and stopped engaging with me when they realised my child's situation and called everyone else a bigot instead It's not the first time it's happened either.

M0stlyHet thanks, it's not been easy, thankfully there seems to be a little bit of light in the tunnel now. Over the last couple of months when talking about things my child has used the word 'if' instead of 'when' 7 times (not that I've been counting) it might seem like a tiny thing but it's the first time in years there hasn't been certainty about the whole thing so I'll take that.

Fish can I ask what kind of professionals have been involved in your child's care? I'm just trying to fathom what kind of doctor would prescribe or encourage the use of these drugs. It's just so completely at odds with the rest of medical care, especially paediatrics. I'm sorry the care you've had has been so unhelpful for both you and your child and I hope you get the support you both need

I've posted before about my work, which at one time meant I covered medical controversies.

Most people assume that medicine (and science generally) are driven by evidence, that doctors are level-headed and cautious.

Fact is, medicine is often affected by fashion, particularly when it comes to what you might call "moral panics". I don't know how many posters are old enough to remember the Orkney child abuse scandal? It was the product of a moral panic imported from America, a moral panic that insisted that satanic abuse of children was widespread. However, despite a number of very high profile and exhaustive enquiries and court cases, they never identified a single satanic sexual abuse ring, although they had previously claimed that they were common all over the country.

This belief system was wholeheartedly endorsed by doctors, social workers, and the criminal justice system. The Orkney case happened as follows:

Two British social workers had done a course on satanic abuse and seemingly were mad keen to spot a bunch of satanic parents. Their attention eventually focused on a small group of parents in an isolated community. The excuse was a description one child made at school of a bonfire party, which the social workers redefined as a satanic ritual. The children were all removed in dawn raids. It took many years for the children to be returned, and for the parents to be exonerated. During the course of the satanic child abuse panic, I believe the authorities identified a couple of individual abusers but nothing to justify the hell they put families through both here and in America.

There have been other occasions in which supposed experts acted with very little evidence. The use of ECT, for instance. It was true that ECT occasionally provided remarkable relief from very severe depression but this didn't balance the appalling side effects suffered by a larger group of patients, or acknowledge that the doctors using ECT didn't know why it might work. There was no evidence to support the use of ECT and eventually it went out of fashion.

There have been plenty of other fashions in fields you would expect to operate on evidence alone. And of course there's the inherently fashionable angle on being transgender at all. The level of social contagion is through the roof

Trans, above all things, is new. Unlike homosexuality, which appears in many species of animal, transgenderism appears nowhere else. Socially speaking, trans apologists refer to two spirit people and other groups who have a "third gender" to endorse their claim that being transgender is innate. This comparison doesn't hold water. There's an article here on what two spirit meant. It varied from tribe to tribe, and not all tribes had two spirit people. Either way, there is no evidence that this had anything to do with a belief that men who were assigned to the two spirit group were considered to have transitioned from male to female. In most cases it appears that two spirit men were so classified because they were gay. Societies which have a "third gender" are typically those with extremely rigid gender roles, so not something that anyone with progressive ideas about human rights would want to encourage.

A close family member gets ECT when in deep depression. It can be effective for some people.

Poppyred85 my child had 2 lots of NHS general counselling (both an hour a week for 8 weeks) we only got the second lot because we had been through another trauma related to my child's GID neither counsellor specialised in gender related counselling.

I paid for some private counselling.

We had some family therapy through WA that wasn't related to trans issues.

I asked for help from educational psychology, the schools inclusion officer and the guidance counsellor at my child's school but all they have 'helped' do is push my child into fully integrating as the sex they present as by using toilets, changing rooms etc.

We also went to the gender clinic where my child had a couple of sessions talking to a counsellor there 6 months apart, then was referred to the doctor who we saw 3 times over the space of about 8 months and was then offered the blockers. We went back a few weeks after being offered them with the decision it was a no and we're then signed off. We live hours away so we couldn't have had any sort of meaningful help anyway really.

We can't get any more NHS counselling as we've had our lot. I am now able to afford an hours private counselling a week again but am really struggling to find someone who is neutral and not pushing my child down this road.

It sounds like a lot when it's written down I guess but this had been over 5 or 6 years and in reality with all the different types of counselling it's probably been about 30-35 hours in total over that time, which is nothing really. Only the sessions I paid for and the ones at the clinic were specialised in gender counselling.

Currently I'm trying to be neutral and give my child lots of links and things to various blogs and lots on YouTube, however I don't want them to get too embroiled into searching for anything to do with being transgender online so I keep a very close eye on what they are looking at.

It's really a nightmare and everywhere I turn now are people normalising my child's feelings and pushing them down a medicalised road now. It wasn't like that at all when this started.

It was hard to get help then because nobody knew anything about it, but they tried, now it's harder to get any help because children aren't seen as needing any help beyond drugs.

I would honestly rather go back to having to push to be listened to than this.

A close family member gets ECT when in deep depression. It can be effective for some people.

Mmm, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be honest about the risks, or offer only ECT and not try talking therapy first. Or only offer talking therapy if the patient agrees to ECT. Actually I can well imagine all these things happening, they play down side effects of psychiatric drugs already, for example. And psychiatrc patients experience coercion in other ways (eg. the "If you leave the ward we'll section you" de facto sectioning.)

I suspect the general public's expectation of a mental health service that is fit for purpose confuses things. People will assume that all counselling and so on will have already happened. Instead we have a service that is only too keen to redirect or refer on patients, because they are stretched past breaking point. Plus there is still so much prejudice around mental health issues, whereas the trans lobby have drummed home the message EMBRACE TRANS so people can mentally go "Oh, its ok, you're not mental, you're trans! Phew!"

illegitimate When you look at the £90K per annum per child cost for those drugs (net of all the related monitoring costs, counselling & review appts), you could buy quite a lot of psychiatric and psychological support for children...

I assume it's just a different budget, so as mentioned MH services are keen to send patients elsewhere. Perhaps MH services (in theory, although they don't) provide the "general gender ponderings" counselling, then when a decision to transition is almost reached, the person is transferred to the transgender services - which provide counselling around the transition process. No joined up-thinking. (In MH services alone, things are left to deteriorate before they'll do anything, making it more costly in the long run.)

Fish The more I read, the more I wonder what the fuck is happening, why is there such an agenda to push these drugs onto children? Are these kids being used as some sort of experiment?

If children transition it muddies the waters a bit (maybe not in the long run though...). If you have a boy who socially presents as a girl from 6 years old (for eg.) then they will have an awful lot of female socialisation after that. So the "gender is only a social construct" argument, which terrifies the transactivists because it's true, sort of scores an own goal. Because that six year old is now socially a woman inside and out (I would guess without male pattern violence and so on) and the XY does become irrelevent in a way. I suppose like certain intersex individuals.

Erm... need to think about this more but hope that makes some kind of sense.

I suspect the trans agenda and feminist agenda would end up with society in the same place, years down the line, but the trans way takes longer and with many more casualties along the way...

Bambambini This is terrifying. Why aren't the media (Guardian) discussing this?
Because they're funded by the right-wing as a sort of parody leftist newspaper? Maybe. Seems like it.