When I asked Bowers if she still thought puberty blockers were a good idea, from a surgical perspective, she said: “This is typical of medicine. We zig and then we zag, and I think maybe we zigged a little too far to the left in some cases.” She added “I think there was naivete on the part of pediatric endocrinologists who were proponents of early [puberty] blockade thinking that just this magic can happen, that surgeons can do anything.”
This seems to be the same sidestep dance/siloed thinking that the Tavistock are engaged in.
Psychiatrists have completed the exact same medical degree as surgeons and physicians in the UK and have to spend the early part of their career working as junior doctors doing medical and surgical jobs before specialising in mental health medicine.
In the Tavistock's case the initial assessing clinicians are, almost without exception, not medical doctors (psychiatrists) but rather psychologists (academic doctors) so they are not allowed to prescribe medication.
Their training does not require them to understand how the human body works as a whole organism, they haven't assisted in surgery, done attachments in paediatrics/obs and gyne/urology, aren't aware of the side effects/interactions of medication etc.
They therefore have to pass the prescription buck to the (medical doctor) endocrinologists, who naturally assume that a) a full capacity assessment has been done and b) the medical evidence for prescribing blockers/X sex hormones as the gold standard treatment for gender dysphoria is incontrovertible. Because, presumably, suicide.
Endocrinologists will have all been through a psychiatry rotation at medical school but their sole focus would be on what is possible to do with hormones, they respond to what other medics are asking for - so the idea that they were the proponents driving early puberty blockade is nonsense.
Now here is a surgeon - the god complex stereotype of surgeons is not without foundation - who has benefited from late transition personally but early transition financially - blaming others for this scandal... well, I can't say what I would like to without getting a strike and I get it, golden bridge and all that... And I like the way that Abigail Shrier let them speak - so last word to Marci.
Bowers draws the line at the colon. “I never use the colon,” she said. “It’s the last resort. You can get colon cancer. If it’s used sexually, you can get this chronic colitis that has to be treated over time. And it’s just in the discharge and the nasty appearance and it doesn’t smell like vagina.”
Nope. Not creepy at all.