Agreed Sophocles it’s hard to dispel the sense anyone looking at this neutrally will get that distressed gender-non-conforming children and young people are somehow politically needed to be invasively and permanently physically ‘transitioned’ with a host of debilitating results and seemingly at any personal cost to those individual children, because all these red flags are being raised and some people just want to plough on regardless of the human cost. The question as always is who benefits from kids doing that? If not the children themselves we have some major system failure problems, don’t we.
NHS treatment should never be being provided for any length of time without a solid evidence base. And yet those continuing to advocate for unevidenced treatment for gender non conforming children, treatment that can’t explain its own risks and benefits because it hasn’t been assessed. Yet the advocates don’t conduct research to back up what they are doing either. So of course the whole system looks at best dangerously amateurish and at worst cynically politically led, both of which are completely unacceptable when it comes to children’s NHS (or private) healthcare.
Professionals with no political axe to grind normally see enormous legal and ethical risks in ploughing on giving permanent life-changing treatments to patients, without any evidence that what IS being done to their young patients is actually relieving the patients’ distress in the long term.
Being driven by a Belief is one thing and can be an amazing impetus to people practising medicine, but here there’s a massive failure of administrative process and oversight when for so long the system has been allowed to run in what looks like a solely belief-based way.
Also when proper standard legal informed consent, practiced so carefully across paediatric medical treatment and research, is reportedly being misread on such a grand scale in this way. How is the law being allowed to be misunderstood or misinformed in a highly sensitive area of practice- where is the GMC guidance? Where are the professional bodies for each specialism involves in caring for these kids, giving their training and guidance? Are external bodies or charities with no legal or medical expertise being allowed to influence inappropriately in this area?
It’s certainly not only the fault of individual prescribing doctors that this situation has arisen, but also the fault of the oversight institutions too. They are in turn overseen by government, so anyone worried about this must continue writing to your MP and government ministers to raise their awareness of this whole issue and that the safety mechanisms dor young patients don’t appear to be working very well in some areas.
When there’s no fact-based or generally accepted values-based justification for treating ‘trans’ children and young people with reportedly vastly fewer safeguards and medical norms than other children and young people are treated with, and no solid rebuttal by professionals or lobby groups of the concerns being raised about this issue, it’s really hard not to get the sense that these child transitions are needed as the poster children for a political agenda with men’s sexual entitlement and and men’s sexual access at its heart. One which the professionals either support, and havent had enough professional curiosity about, or feel they can’t speak out against because of fear.
The key question to ask is why children aren’t being centred at the heart of this discussion and instead gender politics is being centred at its heart? It’s such a massive red flag every single time someone minimises the experience of children and young people and the lack of safeguards for them.
As an example: Invalid legal consent to medical treatment is a huge legal and ethical issue whether it happens to one child who desists or detransitions, or to one child who doesn’t do either of those things, or to hundreds of thousands of children worldwide, which is the likely actual scenario we are looking at. It is a massive scandal and multiple individuals and institutions have chosen to look the other way for way too long so I really hope the UK courts lead the way in focusing clear sightedly on the needs of children, not the needs of adults.