Newsnight now

[PaleBlueMoonlight]

Now

it will be interesting to see if the comments on this thread using female pronouns for the NB person get deleted

because WE CAN'T FUCKING TELL IF SOMEONE'S NON BINARY

we could all tell that person was female though, innit?

I notice through that video package great emphasis was placed on saying that the detransition rate is very low, when the real truth is that nobody actually knows. I paraphrase ;some say the detransition rate is 2%, some say 1% or even lower.’ That is an odd turn of phrase in that context.

And yes, the Mermaids person did come across rather lacking in sincerity. Not being able to see so not seeing her body language, even to me she, they, came across as somewhat falsely cheery and like she was choosing words very carefully for some reason, almost like there was a gun to her head. Not that I’m for a second suggesting that Mermaids would actually put a gun to anybody’s head, I mean in the metaphorical sense.

The Tavi spokesperson said de-transitioners are a tiny minority

And maybe they were, when we're talking about the cohort of 10 years ago. I've seen figures of 1 to 5%, so 95-99 out of a hundred will persist. The Tavi used to see a couple of hundred children a year so perhaps they would expect 2-10 to detransition.

But what if you increase the number to 1000 and get exactly the same numbers persisting as before, because these were the children who, on balance, needed that change?

Then you could have unprecedented numbers maybe all of the other 900 young people per year regretting their transition. We don't know how to predict this, because the situation and the bar for medical transition have changed.

smallblanket

It was the same for us - no counselling at all. They’re being disingenuous. There’s an 18 month waiting list for GIDS. We had to go through CAMHS before being referred. Dd stayed she was male, that was enough for CAMHS to sign her off and send her to the Tavistock. You’re then left with a long long wait with no psychological support as gender dysphoria isn’t classified as a mental health issue.

There’s a black hole in treatment while on the waiting list. Dd was in great psychological distress but the ideology said it was caused by how oppressed as a trans person she was. CAMHS wouldn’t see her, they refused to refer her for an ASD assessment for 4 years. Everything was because dd was transgender.

So awful Non

Your poor Dd

Yes, that is my impression based on the treatment of a friend’s dd, in another European country. Her poor mental health and suicide threats, all put down to being trans. On cross sex hormones swiftly at 16, double mastectomy at 17. It is absolutely heartbreaking. She is possibly autistic, also possibly lesbian.

Mermaids people never come across well do they ? Could that be because the whole ideology does not stand up to scrutiny I wonder ? Anyone ardently backing it looks unhinged when questioned. See Dr H for another example.

As a non-expert in gender dysphoria but an unwilling semi-expert in autism, I'm surprised it isn't the first thing to be raised, SirVix and SamallBlanket. GIDS' own figures put the prevalence of autism at about 13% in gender dysphoric children (in the UK; about 26% in Finland!), way way higher than in the general population.

If I were any of these people I would be waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about the day this blows up to be a massive scandal - the select committee hearings, the tribunals, the court cases... if this is their rationale for their treatment strategy they are going to be on a very sticky wicket when this reaches national scandal level.

YY. Hence my comment upthread about this reminding me of Kids Company.

Although when this finally blows it's going to be more like the Thalidomide scandal

because WE CAN'T FUCKING TELL IF SOMEONE'S NON BINARY

I can't be arsed to go back and look but am entirely likely to have committed pronoun heresy.

I might buy some prayer beads and perform linguistic mea culpas before bed time. Not.

Quite apart from anything else, those of us with autistic DC or relatives know that they are years behind their peers in terms of emotional maturity. My DD is light years behind her siblings in this respect. Yet, like your DD, non, they are treated as if they were a mature adult from aged 18.

Bore - the number of autistic children and young people is likely to be underestimated because autistic girls and women are more likely to be undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed. A double whammy - you grow up not understanding why you feel so different to everyone else; and then you get sterilised and become a lifelong dependent on the pharmaceutical industry as a consequence.

Another way that gender ideology manages to crap on women.

How can they talk about detransitioning and how many do so, when puberty blockers arrest their mental development?

They already know that going through normal puberty reconciles a lot of children to their natal sex. Preventing children going through puberty will have the opposite effect surely?

Just caught up with this. Not perfect by any means but part of a real change in the BBC reporting. I don’t know if the reporter in the film is really woke - I more got the impression that they were carefully picking their way through BBC prescribed language to avoid complaints and censure rather than eg actually believing that sex is assigned.

The mermaids rep did not come over well. Their weird smiling on and off was disconcerting and their focus on everyone being validated was concerning. We don’t “validate” anorexics, we try and offer them help ideally to understand what has caused their issues.

The current Tavi doctor was on a rather sticky wicket and it showed. A mass of contradictions that we will need to wait and see with de transition rates and yet making clear Charing X has been going 53 years. I’d have said 53 years is a long enough period!

The worst bit? Bare faced lie from the NHS that all transitioners have extensive access to therapy/help. How the press offer could put that out I simply don’t know.

Mermaids staff remind me of Scientologists.

I have just come from watching it and agree with everything LowerCase has posted.

The Mermaids rep was amazing - all the over the top smiling that would suddenly vanish as her eye line dropped down.

EM is such a calm, gentle and assured interviewer and it works.

From memory the figures from the Tavistock are 50% of female youth present with ASD traits, 36% moderate to severe. It would be interesting to find out if GIDS diagnose ASD or if they refer to local services.

Scientologists, yes. That same look, the expressions.

@emerencemaybehopeful people outside the UK who can't see the programme on BBC iPlayer might be able to see it here.

Still thinking about this! Local services are stretched to capacity - as I’ve said it took 4 years for our local services to accept our referral, and that was only because they were forced to after dd took an overdose. Our local ASD services cocked up dd’s assessment as they don’t know how ASD presents in females and we’re still fighting for a second opinion.
If the Tavistock refer back to local services for ASD assessments then they again lose access to the data. A patient is placed on a waiting list for assessment - here around 15 months, next county along 3 years! So after waiting 18 months for GIDS appointment, there may be another wait of up to 3 years for assessment for ASD. GIDS will treat your dysphoria and you may find out 3 years later that you have ASD.

Why is a lawyer having to be the spokesperson for a charity? Is this normal? That person freaked me out with all the Cheshire grinning. Not trusting the lawyer one bit. If this is the best spokesperson that Mermaids have then I think they must reconsider. The fact they have a lawyer doing this also makes it seem they are preparing for an onslaught. How could any parent trust an organisation that has to be on the defensive from the oft? Is it because the public will be so intimidated by a lawyer speaking they will not challenge? I think this is a bad move from Mermaids. It only reinforces they have something to hide.

I thought that Mermaids rep was really interesting. When they had finished speaking and the camera stayed on for a few seconds their body language / facial expressions were very odd I thought.

To be fair to the Mermaids rep, I think it was more a question of not being sure if they had finished filming.

It was up to the editor whether to include that last bit.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnui7OqawSM&t=119s
Maybe this helped peak her.

It's a classic of tra/mra rhetoric, Rosemary West chucked in for good measure.

The most astounding thing to me was that the Tavi psychiatrist seemed to have no interest in research. It's one thing to not have the data on longterm outcomes or the reasons behind the increase in referrals; it's quite another to not actually want to have that data. Quite a bizarre lack of clinical and intellectual curiosity. My guess is that they don't want to do the research because the data would not support their current approach.