The lawyers have arrived!

[FannyCann]

The lawyers have arrived at last. Hopefully the brakes will go on.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tdu2PbARVs9uvCPXFubss63jV2Ka4N/view

Also in the UK, puberty blockers prevent the brain developing so these children are suspended in a state of not having the capacity to make these sort of decisions.

So while an 18 year old is an adult, the drugs they have been given mean their mind is still that of a young teen.

Being gillick competent is one thing. Making an informed decision is another.
Does anyone remember the case a few years ago of a young teenage girl with an inoperable heart condition who refused a heart transplant?
She said that she was fed up with being constantly medicalised and was prepared to die; the medical team who had treated her for years supported her, her parents supported her and in interviews she came ascross as very mature and certain of herself. So the courts decided she was Gillick competent and could decide against surgery. But, two years later when (I think) she was 16, she'd changed her mind and asked for a transplant.
Her case isn't entirely comparable with trans kids, but it shows that "Gillick competence" has limits and that kids should always be given the chance to change their minds.

Thank goodness. At last.

This hopefully will stop parents who have a baby of the undesired sex from raising their child as the desired sex on the basis that their toddler wants to be the opposite sex. It's a form of child abuse, in my view.

and neglects to think of the psychological side of health which can be deep rooted in very personal experience.

Transgender health is rooted in people’s very personal experience. Trans people keep telling you their identity and medical need is rooted in personal experience.

Yet you disregard, disbelieve and delegitimise them?

NIo it not the case that people are not believed etc. That’s absolute rubbish, it’s stupid to believe that someone doesn’t feel they feel...you are accusing us first of being stupid,

IT is the case that many older women are not believed when they say they really do understand , that it echos very strongly with what they have lived through

BUT no, we know nothing

Even though trans people have existed forever, you, mean old woman can’t possibly have ever experienced it

It is not that people are not believed in how they feel. It’s the actions that are now, and for the first time ever, being proposed that are not supported.

Medicalisation, lying to yourself and others about your biology, these to me are likely to cause unnecessary damage. The vast majority of transchikdren could, with the right support, grow out of like. Like previous generations managed

THe advantage of that apparpch is healthy adults, both physically and mentally.

When you can show me a child of 10 or 11, maybe even a bit younger, who can actually give properly informed consent on being a lifelong medical patient, infertile, with no sexual function or pleasure, I’ll happily talk about this. Until then, on behalf of these children, I’m just going to say no. A big, fat, decisive NO. Call me what you like. I don’t care.

The evidence for starting children on so-called puberty blockers is sketchy at best. “Puberty blockers” are being marketed (yes, marketed) as safe and reversible when they are nothing of the sort. We are actually talking about serious drugs such as Lupron, being used off-label, with all the desperate side-effects that come with them.

There has been a massive issue highlighted with GIDS “informed consent” procedure, in that it does not address many issues which ought to be fully explored such as future fertility.

I’m so fucking sick of people coming onto these threads and pretending the meanie old feminists are trying to deny trans people’s existence or reality or whatever. No dear, I’m trying to prevent the widespread harm to children. Three quarters of whom are girls. It is not a desirable outcome for children to be given serious drugs which we do not know enough about, medicalised for life and given not a SINGLE shred of breathing space to change their mind.

Fuck. That.

Like I said before, no. As MN tells us, it’s a complete sentence.

No I’m not accusing you of being stupid and I don’t think you are.
I don’t deny there are problems, controversies and unknowns in the area of trans medical treatment for children.

I was comparing 2 things. One hand a call to acknowledge the importance of the lived experience of individuals in relation to health and psychology. On the other a frequent disregard of the legitimacy of gender identity/ trans identity and the need for medical treatment, and its relationship to the lived experience of transgender and transsexual people.

The argument being put forward is same used by HCPs providing and justifying trans healthcare.

It's clear that for a small minority of people, medical support is required

It's also clear that for a significantly larger number of people, that medical intervention is unlikely to have been necessary and that the transidentity they experience is primarily a problem of transistioning from child to adult in heavily gendered society.

Over 10 ? 15? years, in a population of around 65 million, under 5000 adults formally transitioned.

Over the last 2 to 3 years, around 4000 teenage girls ( so from a population of say 3 million ) are applying to physically transition ?

Then you have the middle aged man problem, for every formal GRC holder we have what? 4 or 5 men who would like to be considered as a woman for all intimate purposes

Forgive us for focussing on the majority /most common scenarios. It's a problem of language perhaps with multiple issues being given the same words?

I know many people hate the term transsexual because it's impossible, and definitions are at best vague. yet I do think that when i talk about transgender people, i am excluding those transsexuals ( long term problem that persists well into adulthood coupled with extreme body mutilation in an effort to come to terms with themselves, internal struggles ) and thinking about transgender ( shorter term, immaturity )

Transgender health is rooted in people’s very personal experience. Trans people keep telling you their identity and medical need is rooted in personal experience.

Yet you disregard, disbelieve and delegitimise them?

Cause and effect...

The upside down effect....

I believe there is a problem

I don't think its innate. Thats the point.

Wouldn't surprise me if it was innate for some people, someone somewhere.

Don't believe it's innate for most.

Trans identity and medical need rooted in personal experience - no shit, Fieldof.

So is mine.

My visceral response to a perceived expectation of any sort of performance my brain categorises as feminine seriously interferes with my personal life, my ability to form relationships, my capacity to access public services, my ability to hold down a job.

I don't self-identify as trans but that is the only fundamental difference between me and the subgroup of humanity described as trans. My opinion on what's appropriate and reasonable in terms of gender-dysphoria sufferers' expectations around how our complex gendered trauma sequelae are accommodated by society is just as important as theirs.

Why do you prioritise the analysis of gender dysphoria sufferers who believe they are the wrong sex over those of us who accept we are not? There is no help for this on the NHS if you're an adult with gender dysphoria who doesn't self-ID as under the trans umbrella, nothing at all, unless you have the luck and the self awareness to be able to access and engage with specialist trauma services. We are doing the best we can with nothing and our medical need is not just ignored but actively denied by the trans lobby.

Identifying as trans is not in itself a medical need. It is a coping mechanism for gender dysphoria. They say you don't have to have gender dysphoria to be trans and it's true, because trans is a declaration of identity and not in itself a medical need.

One of the accommodations I need - as in medical need - is spaces in which my dysphoria isn't triggered by the presence of socially constructed pornified woman-stereotypes being presented as evidence of being female.

Female-only spaces accommodate a medical need for gender-dysphoric females.

Toxicity, you don't have to answer a personal question but I am curious as to whether your gender issues extend to how you feel about your body?

Mine are linked because gender is associated with sex which is tied to the body , but I amn't totally sure if my boob repulsion is purely that or something else.

I don’t deny there are problems, controversies and unknowns in the area of trans medical treatment for children
There just shouldn't be any "trans medical treatment for children". Children who feel they are trans can grow up knowing that if they still feel that way as adults they can get medical treatment. Why is that not enough?

Breasts mark me as woman. If something makes me consciously aware that I have them then I'm consciously aware that I'm marked as woman.

Hard to explain. Having them, no problem. But I know they mark me as woman and I know they mark me as inadequate and I've had enough experience of what the world does to the women deemed inadequate. And I can't control the emotional responses the reminder triggers very well because my emotional regulation capacities are fucked.

It's not about what I am or what I look like; it's about how I understand other people to be experiencing me. I don't want to be reminded that I'm the unhuman thing but it's pretty much unavoidable when your body's visibly female.

I imagine old-school transsexual males are running from being the inhuman monster in much the same way, just flipped across the sex axis.

Worst I get I can't leave the house because I can bear for people to see me because then I exist in their minds as woman-the-unhumanned-thing. Flipside, thanks to this place, I did two years of free boobs (fuck the scaffolding of oppression!) with positive mental framing, which was pretty helpful.

Arse, also an issue, tackled that one years back and can now wear women's cut trousers that actually fit.and

I'd still struggle occasionally with the female aspects of my body on a desert island, but only because I'd take my own psychological problems with me. Wouldn't be too severe for me, but then I've put a fair bit of work into radical self acceptance of body over the past few years, thanks to this place.

Thank you

Oh, and pregnancy was a doddle physiologically, but psychologically - knowing other people looked at me and saw indisputable evidence that who I am is 'the thing that is the recipient of the fucking' was the one big blog on the whole experience.

I'm fucking furious they conditioned me into this psychology; I'm even more furious that they tell me I'm the unhuman thing again because I have the temerity to be attempting some sort of recovery instead of identifying as what was done to me.

medical negligence lawyer

It would always come down to this, not women's rights.

Also, I'm no lawyer but

public liability insurance

If a woman or girl is sexually assaulted in a toilet that was previously segregated by sex but now is open to any male who feels "comfortable there, I wonder what liability that business would have having created this dangerous situation. It's going to happen sadly.

Sorry you feel like that Tyro
What you describe seems like more of a dislike about being female or how society has made you feel about being female. Rather than any deep sense that you are ‘the other sex’ and then dysphoria as a response to that.

I see where you are coming from, but for me, in a similar place, that realisation that I was actually female , that my body was in fact my body , and that most of my hang ups were actually caused by external factors only gradually occurred to me over decades.

I went from an internal perspective, of being a boy, into an external one that recognises that most of the feeling of being a boy was a result of not being a "proper girl" in other peoples eyes

Although I must however admit to costing up mastectomy because that still feels wrong

Tyro re this There is no help for this on the NHS if you're an adult with gender dysphoria who doesn't self-ID as under the trans umbrella, nothing at all, unless you have the luck and the self awareness to be able to access and engage with specialist trauma services

No probably not, because what might help would be long term psychodynamic psychotherapy or CAT which is difficult if not impossible to get on the NHS they are obsessed with only CBT.

Not wanting to be female isn’t the same as wanting to be male. I’m not sure that what you describe would be classed as gender dysphoria and a good mental health professional should catch that. Therapy doesn’t come cheap unfortunately and I don’t know if it’s something you could afford or are motivated to find but good luck anyway.

Field you've demonstrated in that one small comment that you don't understand what gender dysphoria is. Why don't you believe anyone has gender dysphoria unless they also invoke the words of a particular ideology? It seems a strange bias to have acquired. Especially considering we're told it's a global phenomenon that's occurred throughout history.

You know the old school transsexuals, in moments of brutal honesty and self awareness, admitted they were principally concerned with the excision of maleness, not the acquisition of femaleness, right?

Stop rewriting transsexual history.

The lack of genuine empathy in Field's posts is quite striking, I have to say. Both for women who've been scarred by growing up under patriarchy and for the "true trans", for whom things have always been far more complicated than Field is making them out to be.

It's always been partly a response to societal homophobia, Field, in every culture it exists in. If you don't understand that you have no hope of ever understanding why people transition or offering them any sort of genuine help.

MIdge I hear you on both the decades and the secretly costing up surgery. Weight related for me though. I see a fat person regardless of my size but I went for the plus rather than minus end of the disordered eating spectrum so it took a while (and a few very extreme weight shifts) to realise there was anything off about my perception of size.

Field is so close yet so far. yes, long term psychodynamic psychotherapy is needed. For gender dysphorics. It's taken me seventeen years of repeated attempts to access help but I have finally managed to get past mental health services safekeeping and find my way to the most appropriate services. And now I'm there I don't dare mention the dysphoria because I'm scared my therapist will think I'm either a man or a bigot.