This actually made me laugh out loud, but ironically

[Pudmyboy]

"To be the parent of a trans person now, in Britain, is also to witness a regular assault of distortions and half-truths. We hear that trans people can access medical treatment with dangerous ease, when they in fact face monstrous waiting times, or that there is a powerful trans lobby trampling on the rights of others when anti-trans groups are significantly better resourced." amp.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/18/being-trans-transgender-rights-issues-rowan-moore-felix-moore

This is a shame. The Observer is usually better than the Guardian but Rowan Moore is a staff writer so I suppose they let him write what he wants. No excuse for not fact checking, though.

@WinstonsWeirdVole

I've complained to the Observer: feel this breaches parts 1 and 2 of their code of conduct (accuracy and opportunity to reply).

I might actually do this too. Can’t believe a once-reputable paper is publishing such blatantly false, gaslighting, wilfully blind tripe.

Oh, please do. That's why I've posted this here - back posting on Mumsnet after a decade because I just can't sit in silence any more. If I've persuaded anyone to take action then it was the right thing to do.

The moaning about the wait for assessment or treatment drives me crazy. Try having any child with a MH condition, or adult for that matter.

Or try having an elderly parent, living in constant pain from arthritis, who has just been told by the doctor that there's a two year waiting list for joint replacement surgery.

@AngelicInnocent

Sorry but what does DARVO mean?

deny, attack, reverse victim and offender usually in the context of domestic abuse- I never did it how dare you say that, bitch ....you know what, she started it, she's always doing it, I'm the victim here

Referring to attacks in women's loos I note the downgrade from "this never happens" to "it is hard to find reported examples".

The whole article is free of any coherent argument.

"It should go without saying that trans people don't want cisgender women and girls to be fearful in bathrooms." But apparently because we're not discussing the problem in the 'right way' there's nothing at all anybody can possibly do about this.

This whole article contains distortions and untruths. Notable is what ISNT in it. There is a lot about the difficulty of obtaining PBs, cross sex hormones but nothing about the two NHS NICE reports recently published which find no evidence that either of these treatments work. Nor is there mention of the Tavistock study which found that PBs did not improve psychological wellbeing. Both Stonewall and Mermaids have totally ignored these studies - they are not interested in evidence.

It’s just the standard fact free appeal to emotion that is churned out by the guardian because they can’t argue it on a factual basis

more than that she said that “sex is real”.

This always leaves me speechless. How do they think babies are made?

I think this thread title should be made clearer to avoid duplicates

It's time the Guardian/Observer did an opinion piece this long written by an actual detransitioner.
It's simply too convenient to continually give trans activists the platform to talk over and marginalise detrans voices.

This (complete with failure to link citation) is incredibly patronising and generalising. How dare they speak on behalf of the detrans community. The numerous detrans people who finally gain the courage to talk about what they gone through are just constantly belittled by these people.

According to a 2015 study, 8% of transgender people have detransitioned at some point, but 62% of those who detransition later transition again. The majority of people who detransition cite external pressure, usually from family and friends, as their reason for doing so. They don’t detransition because they weren’t really trans, but because they are pushed back into the closet.

‘Being trans is not something you put on and take off’...

I thought that you could switch from girl to boy mode as the fancy takes you?

I thought it was less "as the fancy" took you, and more based on economics. Boy mode satisfies the bank account, and pays for girl mode, which satisfies the ego.

Always a focus on public toilets, never prisons. Lots of space to make obscure attacks on JKR, no space to actually discuss the concerns she laid out in her essay.

@OwBist

I thought it was less "as the fancy" took you, and more based on economics. Boy mode satisfies the bank account, and pays for girl mode, which satisfies the ego.

Maybe it depends on if you're an Eddie or a Pippa

“A 2018 study found that autistic resistance to social conditioning may play an important role in incidence of trans identity. One possibility, therefore, is that rates of trans incidence in autistic people may be closer to the true rates in the human population. Non-autistic people are more susceptible to social pressure to conform, so they may be more likely to suppress a potential trans identity.”

I found that an interesting paragraph. It seems to be saying that autistic people don’t ‘perform femininity/masculinity’ as well as NT people and so are more likely to identify as trans. I think that’s possibly true, but not in the way it’s being claimed.

It’s also yet another statement that’s obsessed with stereotypes: ‘don’t follow the stereotypes associated with men? You must be a woman’ and vice versa. The fact most NT people aren’t trans isn’t because only autistic people can ‘recognise their true selves’, it’s because NT people don’t see things as so black and white. They feel that not fulfilling the stereotypes associated with one’s sex doesn’t mean you’re trans because the stereotypes are just that - stereotypes.

I was also interested in the comments about how welcoming the trans community was. I think that’s true. The LGBT community is welcoming, and for those who feel they don’t fit in in some way, then having such a community can be nice. I also feel that the ‘queer community’ (sorry - I hate that word) provides even more scope for being in a special club as anyone can claim to be ‘queer’.

Exactly. 18 weeks? Who actually gets anything within 18 weeks when most people face waits for 2 or 3 weeks just to see a bog standard gp. How many people wait months or closer to years for access to diagnosis? I've been told that the waiting list for autism diagnosis for children in my area is close to 2 years.

My middle child needs a tooth pulling under Ga but will need to wait for minimum of 6 months. Before covid I was waiting for my wisdom teeth to be removed, daily pain and frequent infections but the waiting list is just over a year. Every one is having to wait for everything.

What makes them so special? Either wait or save up/get a loan to go private. They are your options.

Just resharing the link to Maya F's blog in which she picks apart the inaccuracies in the article (for those not on Twitter):

mforstater.medium.com/journalistic-standards-are-not-something-you-put-on-and-take-off-e14f78b487d

And here's the link to complain:

www.ipso.co.uk/complain/

This person is a journalist, apparently...

What is she wittering on about? The Guardian is ridiculous.

oh eve wiseman is full on twaw beeeeeee kiiiind, always has been.

As @RoyalCorgi has pointed out on the other thread - I was incorrect re complaints:

unfortunately the Guardian and Observer have chosen not to be regulated by IPSO. People need to complain to the readers' editor. Email is [email protected]

It's good that there's a polyphony of voices with different experience.

Sadly, as we know from past experience of committees, it's dangerous when committee members are so swayed by emotion that they forget to consult an appropriate range of voice nor give appropriate scrutiny to claims/assertions and their evidence base.

Wiseman also seems to have fallen foul of blurring the lines between an Op-Ed piece and something that needs to be factual. It's poor enough for somebody with a senior post in a news organisation - it's wretched to endorse similar when testifying to a committee.

Thanks for the link to Maya's blog. These contentious opinion type pieces filled with dubious opinion passing for unchecked fact ("scrubbed clean" my arse) are becoming more noticeable among previously intelligent mainstream media. It's lazy and divisive. While I wish Felix well and stories like his are valuable in many ways, the automatic assumption he has to be right and go unchallenged because of his lived experiences - and we're all to defer to it - is the problem here.

Off to dig for Maya now.

I am not a journalist. But there are so many flaws and lies in that article it wouldn’t take me long to point them out. Most annoying of all they have repeated the trope about detransitioning from the Dutch study. The 0.6% figure is the number of people who regretted having gonadectomy only. It does not indicate regret from any other treatments like puberty blockers or testosterone. It cannot be applied to the current cohort of teenage girls in the same way the authors have advised their protocol can not necessarily be applied to the current cohort of teenage girls.

Do they think there aren’t people who have read this stuff and understand it?

Oh, and Eva Wiseman signed the letter condemning Suzanne Moore, for the record.

@AlwaysTawnyOwl

more than that she said that “sex is real”.

This always leaves me speechless. How do they think babies are made?

I'm not sure this is entirely fair. The full quote was

But the basis of the tribunal’s ruling was that Forstater aggressively denied the identities of people with whom she might have to work, more than that she said that “sex is real”.

In context, this sentence does not deny that sex is real. From my reading of the judge's decision in the Forstater case, I think the article misrepresents his reasons, but in context, this sentence does not deny that sex is real. Is this an example of motte and bailey?