In 2016 Transgender Trend reported the Safeguarding issues & failings raised in last night's Newsnight.
'UK: Treatment Dilemmas in Puberty Suppression Seminar'
published: March 26, 2016
"We attended a seminar at Cambridge University entitled ‘Gender Non-Conforming Children: Treatment Dilemmas In Puberty Suppression’ presented by Bernadette Wren, Head of Psychology, Gender Identity Development Service, Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. This post attempts to sum up her presentation, with our comments added under each section. There is much more to say, so we will be referencing some of these points more fully in future posts. There was unfortunately not enough time to ask all the questions we wanted to ask: the information given in this seminar raises more questions than answers.
Introduction
The staff at the Tavistock and Portman clinic feel that they are on the frontline of a social revolution and they get it from all sides. The issues they are dealing with are ethical as well as medical and psychological. There is tension between Tavistock and some trans advocacy groups especially in their use of the “suicide narrative” and promotion of personal stories based on memory – kids are being influenced by fearful stories about their futures, scaring them into making decisions. There is also great pressure from ‘parental advocacy groups’ for pre-pubertal blockers and treatment on demand based on self-determination.
We suspect that Mermaids is one of these pressure groups, given their rhetoric, and the obvious tension between Bernadette Wren and Susie Green of Mermaids at the Government trans inquiry. Tavistock has a good relationship with other trans advocacy groups and has worked with Gendered Intelligence, a fact we questioned, pointing out that G.I. go into schools and essentially normalise the idea to children that they can be the opposite sex and that they have a fixed ‘gender identity.’ We were pleased that the “suicide narrative” was acknowledged as we feel that ‘support groups’ threatening parents with their child’s possible suicide if they don’t transition is a particularly cruel form of manipulation and bullying of parents into putting a child onto the trans path through fear. (continues)
Vulnerable children who previously may have accessed mental health/children’s services are now increasingly presenting to gender clinics, their problems re-interpreted with one simple explanation and solution. Despite the lack of research or knowledge of the full effects of puberty blockers on a child’s brain, the known result of sterility if a child continues on to cross-sex hormones, and the impossibility of knowing how an individual child’s ‘identity’ may develop, the trans lobby advocates a clear halt to that development with puberty blockers administered as early as possible. The ‘reversibility’ of blockers is called into question here. Attending a gender clinic significantly increases the probability that a child will go on to transition, and once on puberty blockers, that outcome is all but assured. After just four assessments, a child under the age of twelve may be made a medical patient for life. (continues)
The transgender theory of an innate, fixed ‘gendered’ brain is unsupported by evidence. The diagnosis of transgender is dependent on a view of children and adolescents as autonomous agents capable of making their own decisions and choices in a bubble outside of any form of parental or cultural influences, and that the choice to define themselves as transgender is unrelated to any other personal beliefs, level of understanding, influences, experiences or psychological states. This is contrary to all knowledge of child and adolescent development and psychology. Parents have clearly been made fearful by the “suicide narrative” of trans advocacy groups and are typically intolerant of uncertainty, wanting a clear diagnosis which supports their own fixed beliefs of ‘normality.’ (continues)
Child and adult services are totally separate, so outcomes have not previously been tracked; the initiation of a cohort study is welcome, but long overdue. The status of children on the transition path will be raised to ‘guinea pigs’ whereas previously they weren’t even that. Given that ‘gender non-conformity’ is normal, it seems that the ‘problem’ has been created by cultural conditioning and parental investment in gender stereotypes, pressure on children to conform to those stereotypes, bullying of children who resist that pressure, and a concerted campaign by trans activists to convince everyone that those children who do not conform must be the opposite sex, a ‘solution’ which just reinforces the prejudices of the bullies. The idea that we should halt a child’s development, fill him or her with hormones and later surgically alter his or her body in order to meet society’s expectations of conformity, is chilling. (continues)
www.transgendertrend.com/uk-treatment-dilemmas-puberty-suppression-seminar/