Why is Susie Green seen as such an expert on the medical issues, over and above the actual medical experts?
May 2018 James Kirkup Spectator:
'Why are some MPs trying to shut down the transgender debate?'
(extract)
"Despite its influence, it is worth noting what Mermaids is not. It is not a research body. Its activities are support (for families) and advocacy: based on its contacts with those families, it argues for what it sees are better policies and practices by the NHS and others. It does not carry out or commission clinical or academic research. Its most recent annual report lists among its charitable activities “campaigning and advocacy” and says: “Mermaids has also become more active in lobbying”.
There is regular dialogue between Mermaids and the GIDS, but the two sides do not always agree. An example is on the time the GIDS team take to give referred children the hormone-blocking drugs that stop their bodies developing the physical characteristics associated with their birth sex.
In evidence to another Commons inquiry in 2015, Mermaids argued that GIDS should make such drugs available much more quickly. The GIDS team has generally resisted that call, more than once saying that “any decision around hormone treatment needs time and considered thought.”
And in evidence to that earlier committee, Dr Bernadette Wren of the GIDS said this:
“I know that Susie and Mermaids would like a fast track so that young people who are already well into puberty and feel that they know that they want to move forward into physical intervention would bypass our assessment process and move straight into physical intervention. We feel that is not an ethical way to practise.”
Here’s another summary. A transgender charity that says it is engaged in lobbying lobbied politicians and doctors to change the way children are treated by doctors. The doctors declined to make that change because it would be not be ethical to do so." (continues)
blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/05/why-are-some-mps-trying-to-shut-down-the-transgender-debate/
& this is in current context of safeguarding issues being raised by professionals about the appropriateness of affirming care at Tavistock GIDS:
OP EweSurname wrote:
www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/governor-quits-blinkered-tavistock-clinic-82db7wzq8
A governor of the NHS trust that runs England’s only gender clinic for children has resigned in protest at its “blinkered” and “one-sided” response to doctors who had raised the alarm about “woefully inadequate” care.
Marcus Evans, a consultant psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman trust with three decades’ experience, told The Sunday Times that the trust had said things that were “not true”, had created a “climate of fear” and was trying to “dismiss or undermine” concerns raised by its own clinicians.
Some openly homophobic parents pushed their children to transition because they were gay, the report said. In other cases, youngsters seized on transition as a “solution” after abuse or bereavement. Their histories were not properly explored by clinicians struggling with “huge and unmanageable caseloads” and afraid of being accused of transphobia if they questioned the “rehearsed” surface presentation.
The report said Gids had tried to “placate” lobby groups such as the Mermaids charity, which campaigns for children to be given sex-change treatment."
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3515980-Times-article-Governor-quits-blinkered-Tavistock-clinic