Susie Green and Keira Bell on Newsnight

[OldeMagick]

It's about halfway in

Emily Maitlis not giving an inch

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pyyc/newsnight-01122020

Remember Kids Company? The great and the good queueing up to laud the founder and throw shedloads of public and private money at it? Then when questions finally started being asked we were told that without KC there would be social unrest and rioting in the streets?

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/25/kids-company-warned-officials-closure-could-lead-to-riots-and-social-unrest

Now you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone admitting to ever having supported it.

The wonderful, wonderful Janice Turner writing in the Times today about Susie Green and her Newsnight performance. It is some way into the article (but do read it all because the opening story about tandem bicycles made me snort my tea).

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5428218a-34de-11eb-b015-3b650b0f0101?shareToken=772981375bd9429488d0684b940e9864

@NotBadConsidering that’s appalling! I wondered where her 1% came from.

"NotBadConsidering" - thanks for the link to the paper. The 1% is amazingly misleading. Here's the disclaimer from the paper:

Our findings could be an underestimation of people with regret after gonadectomy, because some might choose to go elsewhere for reversal therapy or might experience regret without pursuing reversal surgery or HT. Regret might not always result in a desire for reversal therapy, as it may be hidden from others. In addition, in our population the average time to regret was 130 months, so it might be too early to examine regret rates in people who started with HT in the past 10 years.

So not only are they only looking at regret for people with gonadectomy, it's also too soon to expect regret for most of their population (unsurprisingly, the number of patients has increased dramatically over time), and finally they only count people who actually return (to the same clinic that they regret using) for further drug or surgical intervention.

Given all those caveats, the true regret figure could be literally anything.

It was purely a paper exercise; they only looked at the clinic notes and made no attempt to follow up patients. There is a whole host of reasons why a patient who felt their treatment by a clinic was wrong would not return to that clinic.

Thanks Stand, I came on to post it too! I get the sense that Janice is feeling even bolder than usual

Given all those caveats, the true regret figure could be literally anything.

Exactly. Keira is only 23. There have been 7 years of patients treated in between Keira starting treatment and this ruling who are still only in their late teens and early 20s. The huge rise in girls going on PBs and testosterone is not included in any study.

No one can confidently claim what the detransition rate is because this is a live experiment.

I've finally watched it. EM had done her homework. And Keira was so calm and composed - very impressive.

What is clear is that Susie Green has no interest in detransitioners. She seems to regard Keira as an irritant that should go away rather than a cause for alarm. The Tavi and Mermaids need to be working with Keira to prevent repeats of this awful mistake, not describing greater oversight of the process as a disaster, parroting false suicide stats and misrepresenting the detransition rate.

I haven't read it yet but my suspicion is that the study on detransitioners was carried out on middle-aged mtf transitioners, not the current cohort of transmen.

Unfortunately for Susie, there are a lot of detransitioners out there now. To be fair, a lot of them seem to be in America. However, they're on YouTube. They're on Reddit (still, just, I think) sharing their experiences. A lot of them probably feel too fragile to take on court proceedings now, but as they get older they might.

Keira's win will give some of them courage to start thinking about their options.

Speaking of Kids Company, that matter has currently resurfaced:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9012395/Alan-Yentob-denies-strong-arming-ministers-handing-millions-doomed-Kids-Company-charity.html

There was a lot or moral strong-arming though with KC.

A Class Action might be a good idea

So we have these in the U.K.? I thought that was a US think (with humongous payouts).

UK yes, used by women too. Pensions easily spring to mind

@highame

A Class Action might be a good idea

Class Actions aren't really a uk thing because of how our law works. They tend not be done because the process works against group actions here.

It is much more of a US thing.

@Rhynswynd I found the interview on YouTube.

@NotBadConsidering

nauticant

To clarify further, the “fewer than 1% detransition” lie is usually accompanied by this paper from the Netherlands:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29463477/

It is frequently embedded as a link in newspaper articles etc.

Except what it actually shows is that fewer than 1% regret the gonadectomy they have undertaken. So they asked the most committed of all medical trans patients if they regretted gonadectomy and fewer than 1% did.

This paper in no way describes that fewer than 1% regret puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, the infertility they now have, the fact their sexual function never existed, their mastectomy, their vaginal atrophy, their permanent facial hair, their permanent voice change. None of that is listed. None of that has been explored.

It’s a deliberate and totally scandalous use of a paper to legitimise a process in a false way.

It’s utter lies, and anyone who repeats that trope is just as reckless as someone who repeats false suicide stats.

Not to mention the age and demographic of the individuals in the study... More older natal males, it's certainly not specific for children with gender dysphoria. I can't access the full paper, but I recall that they did a study into the development of breast cancer in MtF and that showed the age breakdown. Also as the paper includes data from as far back as 1975 it is blindingly obvious that most of the participants would not have been on puberty blockers.

@17thEarlOfOxford

"NotBadConsidering" - thanks for the link to the paper. The 1% is amazingly misleading. Here's the disclaimer from the paper:

Our findings could be an underestimation of people with regret after gonadectomy, because some might choose to go elsewhere for reversal therapy or might experience regret without pursuing reversal surgery or HT. Regret might not always result in a desire for reversal therapy, as it may be hidden from others. In addition, in our population the average time to regret was 130 months, so it might be too early to examine regret rates in people who started with HT in the past 10 years.

So not only are they only looking at regret for people with gonadectomy, it's also too soon to expect regret for most of their population (unsurprisingly, the number of patients has increased dramatically over time), and finally they only count people who actually return (to the same clinic that they regret using) for further drug or surgical intervention.

Given all those caveats, the true regret figure could be literally anything.

That's such a good point

www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/sex-gender-and-gender-identity-a-reevaluation-of-the-evidence/76A3DC54F3BD91E8D631B93397698B1A

This is a good paper which brings together data on children and adolescents. And I think that it is open access.

17thEarl And presumably it's pretty relevant to whether people seek reversal or not that there's no reversal available for gonadectomy! It must be like a bad dream you can't wake up from.

In addition, in our population the average time to regret was 130 months

They were measuring time to regret being documented in clinic notes. It is likely the time to regret was considerably shorter than this.

In addition, in our population the average time to regret was 130 months, so it might be too early to examine regret rates in people who started with HT in the past 10 years.

Interesting.

Does some back of fag packet calculations.

So if someone close to a certain activist was to eventually have regrets, you wouldn't expect them to until... yeah its just hit about 10 years I believe.

So that would mean that someone has been campaigning for a decade on the basis of anecdata which may be completely consistent with the one study that they repeated quote, and they still may be in the 1% that they quote.

And thats about a seperate treatment to puberty blockers and one that girls can't even have.

I think Datun has pointed out before but girls lose particularly badly in terms of the positives for gender changes because you can't change your physical size which is a barrier to 'passing' as a man and the side effects seem to be particularly bad. Which may mean women have regret a lot sooner than men, and the pattern for transition for males is distinctly different anyway and much more likely in middle age rather than a teenager.

So this particular activist is talking about issues irrelevant and not necessarily applicable to females, basing it on a study on older males who had a different procedure not puberty blockers, and this study showed that regret in this group was happening on average after a longer timeframe than her child has had this procedure.

Ah. So its a complete strawman argument, not just one based on anecdata.

Strawman indeed.

Also I wonder the psychological impact of even admitting regret after such a radical irreversible procedure.

Quite hard I imagine. Trust would be a hell of an issue - those who didn’t question you and who cheered you on, plus those who tried to dissuade you (building bridges and mending relationships there).

In such a hypothetical situation, your entire life would be a sunk cost fallacy. How could anyone dare explore whether they had regrets if one of their closest relatives had made a career and income out of campaigning for people like you to make that choice?