Mermaids review

[Glinner]

Good news for people who don't believe gender non-conforming children should be told they're in the 'wrong' body, and may need a lifetime of drugs and/or surgery to 'fix' that.

twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1074664349854298113

I have transcribed the first 15 minutes of the second half. I'm back in work tomorrow but have done a few other bits (not edited) up to 30 mins. I want to share some, while I am still working out how to share a document anonymously:

Transcript

Jan (the trainer) So, gender dysphoria, which is what you are told you have if you are trans and wanting to transition, not everyone. It’s not a mental health issue. The World Health Organisation began removing it in 2016 and it was completed just earlier year. It now comes under a new category of gender incongruence. Yeh? Now, that is very similar to where they put the intersex, yeh? So what I was saying before, organisations and things seem to be bringing them closer together and we’re not sure where it’s going to end up, but it’s interesting.
Now, there are lots and lots of reasons for this. It’s been going on a long time. Two of the main ones really was the research that’s been coming out from different research projects – some have been 40 years long from all around the world. It’s sort of all been coming together. And both in the Lancet last year and Endrocine guidelines, they said that everything is pointing to a biological underpinning, yeh?

Note how she says 'the intersex'

Now, there are lots and lots of reasons for this. It’s been going on a long time. Two of the main ones really was the research that’s been coming out from different research projects – some have been 40 years long from all around the world. It’s sort of all been coming together. And both in the Lancet last year and Endrocine guidelines, they said that everything is pointing to a biological underpinning, yeh?
So the easiest way to think of it really is, we’re all made the same way, bubble, bubble, bubble, we’re all female, bubble, bubble, bubble and out we go on this spectrum and some people go more towards Jo and some towards Barbie. There’s plenty of men who are petite and plenty of women who are big and broad, it’s just about the human race on that spectrum and where we are divided.
We’ve got the intersex population and what they’re saying is that 1 per cent of the trans population are just part of that and there’s now lots of evidence to support that. And when we think of cultures such as The Navaho who have just always accepted that for thousands of years.
Culturally, we are changing, yeh? We are no longer Mum, Dad, 2.4 children. Families are very different now, much more blended, much more diverse, so children growing up now have a very different norm to what I had growing up.

(I've left out a bit about Martina Navratilova)
Our young people now have got a lot of amazing role models growing up, you know, Nicola Adams, Tom Daly, Paris Lees, incredible people doing amazing things. They just happen to be part of the LGBT population, but it’s not the first and most important thing about them.
A lot of young people as well going on line they’re finding bloggers and vloggers. We’ve had transgender children on children’s TV for 10 years (whispers, comically) The grown ups didn’t know...
Again, We’ve had a lot of this self identification going on – ‘what that person’s saying is exactly how I feel’ and then that has given them the knowledge and vocabulary to then be able explain it to somebody else.
We’re seeing a lot of that and some medical research that’s going on. This was covered on Horizon a couple of years ago; I don’t know if you can still get it online, you might be able to, they were looking at brains, basically been looking at brains for a long time when it comes to sexuality and now they were looking at it in regards to gender identity.
There was a study done in Holland where science already knows that when children perform certain tasks with their hands that there’s a different part of the brain stimulated in a natally born male than in a natally born female, so you got some kids in a room, some are transgender, some are cisgender and they just got them to do these tasks while they measured what was going on, and what it showed was that the children who were assigned male at birth and identified as boys and those assigned female at birth who identified as boys, that the brain activity was the same, the same the other way round.
Scientifically, it’s in its infancy, but again, it is interesting and it’s interesting enough for them to get a lot of funding to continue with that, but obviously when we put all this together, it’s safe to say that 1 per cent of the human race are trans, always have been, always will be, and there’s a lot more stuff on that as well.

So, Mermaids were founded in 1995, so we’ve been around a long time and this was our first mission statement - for want of a better word - for what we wanted to do, what we wanted to achieve. Now, talking about language changing, our wording has changed so much. So with this bit here where it says ‘children and teenagers dealing with gender identity issues’... At one of our residentials, some of our teens came up to us and said, ‘we don’t have an issue. We know who we are, it’s other people who have an issue with us, so could you take that word off us? So we did, so now word things slightly differently.
We wanted reduce isolation and stigma: unfortunately, we’re still working on that, inform families of rights and, In 1995, we were not many, thankfully not a lot, we wanted to provide peer support and friendship, both online and face-to-face, that was really, really important. These kids need to know they are not the only ones. They may be the only one in their school in their church. They may be the only one in their hobby group, their community group. Theres Thousands of children like them and all over the UK, all over the world and they need to meet and become friends and share their experiences.
Online was quite new then. We knew we had to make the most of it - and we did. So over the years, we’ve done a lot of work with the NSPCC, Childline and particularly, the past 3 to 5 years online has become even more valuable because 40 per cent of the young people we support online cannot be ‘out’ at home for various reasons and sometimes school may be the only place they can be themselves. Something you may be aware of is that School may be supporting the child and they may be known as a pronouns in school and the parents don’t know about it because they can’t be ‘out’ at home. If the parents find out, it can become a safeguarding issue, so you need to be very careful when you are talking about your cases.
Collaboration with the third sector. So back then we were trying to educate schools, educate emergency services, educate people such as yourselves, we didn’t really get listened to. Now we are just playing a huge game of catch up, we were trying desperately to get all that information out there and then promote good practice. Being trans is not a bad thing, it’s just a thing. It’s how we handle it and our perceptions and what we do and how we can change things.
xxx demand has gone up 500 per cent in three years. We don’t shy away from it, we don’t pretend it’s not happening, but we did try and warn everyone. It began with the introduction of the 2010 Policy Act and we’ll talk about that later - that was a huge gamechanger. That put laws in place that meant trans people could stay in work, It meant that trans children could stay in school, because there were laws to protect them, so visibility went up, and with visibility comes self identification.
We also saw things being put on television, most of it not very good, yeh, but it was still there, it was beginning to be spoke about, it was in the press. And again, this whirlwind began to happen We’re at a point now where there’s kids just popping out everywhere saying, ‘this is me, this is me, this is me’ and now everyone’s like, ‘what do we do?’ and while that’s happening, kids are xxxxx We are doing our best and what I often say is, make sure you talk to other people and share your knowledge with them.
So the daily challenges, these are really, really common with a lot of our families. Isolation is a really, really big one and I always say, When someone is LGBT, don’t assume that they want to be LGBT. They may not. They may have real, real internal conflict; if they’ve got a strong faith, strong culture, strong belief they may not want it and that internal conflict alone can cause severe isolation. It could be that they’ve come out to their family and their family are not supportive. It could be that you’ve got parents supporting a young person or a child, but extended family grandparents, aunts and uncles, that kind of thing. They could lose a lot. They could lose friends, so isolation is a big one. We see a lot particularly with little ones. They will stop being invited to birthday parties and that kind of thing, so that isolation can be a slow process but nonetheless it can be there,
Discrimination and prejudice – we’re always going to have bigots unfortunately, so my way of thinking is, well, 100 per cent - we know that 10 per cent of the population comes under the LGBT plus umbrella, say 10 percent are bigots: you’re never gona change that unfortunately, but then there’s this 80 per cent. That 80 per cent I think, with the right information, the right knowledge, the right level of understanding, could become real allies and supporters. The problem we have is that 95 per cent of what is out there, particularly in the media, is rubbish or inaccurate, so we want to get the right information out there so that you make your own informed choice.
Bullying - it’s not just peer to peer, it can come from lots of places; we’ve had cases where it’s been a teacher, a social worker, a GP. It can come from within the family, so If the family are very fearful co-ersion can spill over into bullying and parents, carers and siblings can suffer the same prejudices, but It’s important to know that when we look at the laws that the laws will protect them and they will also protect you if you are caring for someone who’s trans.

Final bit of spamming, but the best bit (Jan the trainer continues..)

So this is the Stonewall report that was published last year, it was published in the Guardian. If you don’t have a copy of this, I would suggest that you download it for free from Stonewall website.
And this is Just a snippet: ‘So 45 per cent of young trans people have attempted suicide, that’s hospital admissions. One in 9 have received death threats. 84 per cent have self harmed and 75 per cent are actively self harming and 51 per cent are bullied in school and that is reported bullying only’. This has got to change, yeh? And we’re all responsible for that. It’s not just down to schools it’s not just down to LGBT organisations . It’s everyone, yeh?

Undercover GC male: Sorry Jan, about the suicide figure, I was just .. I’ve read quite a bit trying to get up to speed with this. There’s quite a lot of people disputing that figure cause it’s self referred online from a group of 27 people or something....

Jan: No, that’s not right

Undercover: Is it not? Is that not the case?

Jan: This report now, there’s thousands of kids involved

Undercover: Really?

Jan: And before this there was one done by peace mental health. And the figures were pretty much the same. That was done in 2014.

Undercover: So when it says ‘young trans people’.. given that you say that we don’t know that a lot of them are, cause like not everybody’s out or self identifying, it’s kind of difficult to know what that size of .. you know, what’s the cohort? Because we have to deal a lot with statistics.

J: I can’t remember the exact numbers, but that I think it was 4,000 kids between maybe 11-19. Can’t remember off the top of my head. You can get the whole report...

U: Yeh, I will. I’ve read quite a few fairly respectable type people, academics and researchers who’ve really taken issue with that because there’s a problem of promoting suicide in culture. Suicide promotion is a difficult one and it’s a difficult lever to use with parents. As you say, you’ve got schools might be treating a young person one way and then parents not being in that loop and that’s a really interesting safeguarding one. I’m sure we’re gona come on to that. But if schools are being told that the children who present to them as trans have got almost a one in two chance of trying to kill themselves, that’s an unusual pressure to put on any educational establishment to respond to and I think it is incumbent on all of us to have absolutely crystal.

I’ve lost lots of friends to suicide, actually. By the time I was 40 I’d lost four friends and I lost another one two years ago, so I’m very, very careful about suicide and about its use. I also suffer from depression, I have had suicidal ideation myself, but I think we need to be really, really careful about throwing out a huge stat like that, because when we go away, we’re all busy, we’re all gona have other things to do and we’re gona think, ‘45 per cent of young trans people attempted suicide’ so we need to know if that’s actually true. So I’m just saying that...

J: Yeh, I mean if you want to contact stonewall that’s... (slightly aggrieved)

U: I know what they say, yeh, but there are other views on that and I think it’s incumbent on us all as human beings to be certain of what we say.

J: I would say though please don’t assume that because someone is intelligent and in academia they don’t also have the ability to be transphobic, because I see that a lot.

U: Absolutely. Anybody can be anything, but I think suicide statistics... the Samaritans are very clear in their guidance that it mustn’t be used willy nilly, so I would just say as a human being you know, I’ve got kids, I’ve been in education for 20 years - we really need to interrogate the actual real truth behind that and be satisfied ourselves in all authenticity where it is the case and that’s all I’m saying, because it is a very, very important thing. Suicide is not something to skip over in a Powerpoint.

Well done. That is hard work in many ways.

I take my hat off to all the people that manage to sit through this tripe.

I'm guessing the thread might get pulled....

It doesn't break anything does it? No misgendering or referring to private parts of individuals? The rest of the rules are a bit hard work to understand...…………..

That is just go smacking. 40% "secret trans" with mermaids conspiring with them.

*gobsmacking

I don't know but there'll be some loophole.

I do have other bits, got to around 25 mins I guess, into the second half just after the trainer getting agitated by the GC guy:

When you are 16 if you’ve gone through all of this process you’ve continued with both your physical and mental assessments at the GI clinic you've thoroughly explored your fertility preservation options, preserved your fertility if that is your wish and you’ve been on blockers for at least a year to give you thinking time, then you may (and it’s a huge may) be offered a very low dose of cross sex hormones, full strength hormones and surgery is adult services only it is not available to children

This clinic has been running since about the 70s so they’ve been around for a long time – they know what they're doing.

So this is where we will often see mental health deteriorate particularly in pubertal teems so assuming parent or carer are both supportive and proactive and a lot of them are not...

your first port of call will be your GP. We still have GPs who are saying there’s nothing can be done til you’re 18, you're just confused or if they do do anything theyll do a or a referral to CAHMS, im not going to knock cahms they are wonderful at what they do
But The main issues there are

1. They are not gender identity experts by their own admission
2. The waiting times – it’s six weeks to two years depending on where you live During that waiting time that’s where we’ll often see the mental health deteriorate, so they have negative thoughts self harming and eating disorders can become really really common, cos they try to stop their body from developing by starving and trans boys know they can get their weight low enough that their periods will stop what teenage boy wants to have periods, depending on the level of dysphoria and how they're coping with that

Undercover GC male: But not all trans kids have got dysphoria as you say

Jan: Not all, but most

Undercover GC male: Most? Alright, cause you said that 45 per cent of trans kids have tried to kill themselves

Jan: I didn’t say that!

Undercover: It’s on the slide there

Jan:And suggested that you might want to get it and read it

Undercover: I would exercise caution..

Jan: Please don’t put words in my mouth

No, I'm not, I'm putting words from your powerpoint. I’m just very, very cautious about that because we’re now in a moment when we’re all thinking that trans kids have all got dysphoria, but You said that very casually they don’t, not all trans people are dysphoric – that’s brilliant. But we need to know what we’re talking about 'cause
If you don’t and if many young trans people don then they don’t relate to that statistic that statistic is about young people who might have all kids of comobidities? and be....

Jan: I’ve been asked to come here for an hour and share some knowledge. There is absolutely no way i can share a huge level of knowledge in an hour, i can give you an overview, I can give you some signposting and I can give you some basic information, that is all I can do

Undercover: I understand that and appreciate your time and thank you very much. But i think its very very important that we’re clear what we’re talking about...

Jan: Yeh, but the whole idea of me being here is to give you an overview and some signposting and then hopefully you will then continue to educate yourself but you will do it from the right organisations

Apologies for the rough cut.

Does anyone remember Victoria Wood's sketch Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah? I'm getting flashbacks to Nicola's evening lecture...

Even though the second part is more alarming in terms of safeguarding and child protection, the first part is just barking. Yes she talks about not being so academic doesn't she? Leave your critical thoughts at home...

I wish I could have covered it all, but I think I am a slow transcriber.

There will be the original download somewhere, so hoping this is not our only chance.

Hmm. Many drugs have side effects but are prescribed and taken because the patient finds the side effects less awful than the condition the drugs are being taken to alleviate.

TRA propaganda. Have you researched desistance SGB?

I have put xxxs where I couldn't make it out and then yes, comorbidity? has a question mark as I couldn't quite make out what he was saying (plus I wasn't bright enough to know what the word meant :-0 so thanks for solving the mystery).

I still have the second part open, so can still play this if anyone needs anything specific? I got to about 25 minutes of (rough) transcribing and realised that this is not a profession for me!

Does anyone remember Victoria Wood's sketch Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah? I'm getting flashbacks to Nicola's evening lecture..

LOL - It reminds me of a cross between a bad tupper ware party and a born again church youth group.

Yeh?

Comments about spectrums of bra sizes and lower apendeges... Jokey Jan saying to the male bodies in the room "I'm sure you're all 12s" Wow.

1. thanks for doing this transcription
2. I wonder what the others in the room were thinking? possibly- why is she getting so defensive?
3. a PP mentioned Ben Goldacre- coincidentally I looked him up tonight - this is exactly the kind of thing he would be brilliant at debunking and I really wonder why he isn't, because I can't find any sign of him doing so.

The side effects of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones that are known include zero sexual function, sterility, and half the expected bone density

Yes. There are also possible impacts on brain development, IQ and cancer risk, although we don't know very much about these because the research hasn't been done because the drugs are prescribed off-label. And longer-term physical and mental health sequelae are completely unknown.

I'm just going to repeat that. We're prescribing drugs to children off-label and unevidenced, which may cause sterility and osteoporosis, increase cancer risk and stunt cognitive development.

There's word salad and then there's whatever the fuck that was. Word arable farm maybe. Thanks for wading through it Hands

And I would like to buy the undercover gc male a large drink.