TRAs attempting to obstruct Cass review.

[FireFlyBoogaloo]

Saw this on Twitter. It seems that TRAs and captured alphabet groups are co-ordinating to try and stop the Cass review getting access to data that will allow the results of experimental treatment for trans-identifying children to be assessed.

twitter.com/CTransTalks/status/1542834235752448002

Might be worth writing to Javid, Cass and perhaps Baroness Nicholson and any other interested parties to make them aware and also to express support for the review.

I wonder what some members of the trans community will do when they have discovered the names and the contact details/social media accounts of those involved? Jane actually talks of civil disobedience and 'parking our tanks on their lawns'. I don't like the sound of that. What is Jane Fae advocating there?

Yes. This has the potential to turn very ugly and it is fortunate that this group is very much a minority and so any silliness will be able to be contained.

Was it in Bristol where they thought babies were getting good paediatric heart care and the higher failure rate was obscured due to the babies being very sick to start with?

Yes, it was, Melroses. The anaesthetist who blew the whistle, Stephen Bolsin, subsequently couldn't get employed in the UK and emigrated to Australia. The NHS treatment of whistle-blowers has been appalling in the past - I've no idea if any of the promises to change that have been successful.

Is the Cass review just looking at regret/detransition, or is it looking at factors like long term physical health problems, eg osteoporosis etc as well?

I wonder what some members of the trans community will do when they have discovered the names and the contact details/social media accounts of those involved? Jane actually talks of civil disobedience and 'parking our tanks on their lawns'. I don't like the sound of that. What is Jane Fae advocating there?

Fucking hell, they really are shitting themselves about this aren't they?

If they want to act unlawfully thats up to them. But it should be dealt with appropriately.

Current update of the research plan. We need more detail.

cass.independent-review.uk/research/

This.

This issue has arisen because these children have not been tracked and no one knows what's happening to them.

And the trans lobby trying to stop this investigation goes a long way to explaining why.

I hope people (Javid, Cass, etc) are beginning to understand the extraordinary lengths that have been gone to, to surround this issue in secrecy.

Let these organisations send their protest letters. As you so rightly point out, boots, the more transparent they are, the better.

They do understand. That:s why the report must be banned from the public view. It:s all part of LGBT furtiveness eg parents not to be told their child is transitioning. There must be no discussion, no challenging, no questioning.

This type of medical research using anonymised records is not uncommon.

Danish data, for instance, used medical records of all women who had had abortions in Denmark over many decades and a control group of women who had not had abortions in research which ended up showing that a woman's risk of later breast cancer is not affected by having an abortion.

The trick is to do the anonymising well, and that would probably include also anonymising more precise data on geographic areas and obviously not only the names etc. of the patients but also all similar information about their health care providers. (I don't know if these points are even relevant in this case, but just wanted to point out that there is nothing unusual about anonymous medical studies which use patients' records without requiring explicit consent from each patient.)

Similar thing happened to me, when a TRA insisted that trans people have other-sex brains and this was provable because studies had been done using brain scans.

I suggested that we make brain scans part of the diagnostic process, but... well. You can guess how that went.

Somewhat but not wholly tangential.

Criticism from LGBTQ+ organizations has put a halt, at least temporarily, to enrollment in a University of California Los Angeles study seeking to examine the neurobiological underpinnings of gender dysphoria.

Gender Justice LA and the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network released a joint statement, citing major ethical concerns about the research endeavor at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, led by psychiatrist Jamie Feusner, MD.

www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/91423

Still paused: www.semel.ucla.edu/transgender

It seems odd that TRAs want to exclude those with GRCs from the research. I would have thought that those who have gone on to get a GRC would be some of those who are most likely to have had positive outcomes and are less likely to have detransitioned.

I wonder what it will show.

You're not wrong that it is revealing.

Specifically faetozer links to the SI impact assessment, and dismisses it as approx. a dozen pages of carefully crafted civil service gobbledegook that is there for the purposes of applying glitter to what is otherwise a complete legislative “winnit”.

(oh and thanks for the link to let me know what a winnit is. 😳)

But it's not gobbledegook. It's remarkably clear.

It says: This order will allow analysis of health outcomes for those patients who have been through the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trusts Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).

This analysis will provide a clinical evidence base on which the Cass Review can make recommendations to NHSE regarding how these services should be provided in the future to improve patient outcomes.

Without this SI the researchers would be unable to complete this work in a rigorous or meaningful way. The ambition is for this research project to provide findings into the effectiveness and long-term outcomes of the treatments provided through children’s gender identity services, which may in turn lead to improved health outcomes for this group of patients.

Anyone who has a problem with that is against improving patient outcomes. Why would anyone be opposed to that, hey?

Their bornagain?

I would expect a number of charities and organisations to express their opinions on the SI and matters of data handling and privacy. These might include:

Use My Data: www.usemydata.org/index.php

Health Data Research UK Public Advisory Board: www.hdruk.ac.uk/news/health-data-research-uk-announces-chair-of-public-advisory-board/

Health Education England People's Advisory Forum:
www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/Peoples-Advisory-Forum

They say it's because the GRC is meant to break the link between past and present legal identities, and this would join them.

Jane actually talks of civil disobedience and 'parking our tanks on their lawns'. I don't like the sound of that. What is Jane Fae advocating there?

I don't want to read the link, because I find Fae very disturbing. But I have been somewhat concerned for Dr Cass ever since the review was announced. It was inevitable that if the review was done with any kind of integrity it was going to make TRAs very angry, and she's a woman. I really hope they don't start trying to terrorise her in her personal life.

If GRC holders were excluded from the research, then TRAs would be able to use that as a basis to question the validity of the findings. They use that trick all the time; make data inaccessible and then use the lack of data to invalidate any statistics they don't like.

That's not what the GRC is for. It was to allow same sex marriage (as long as one of the parties was 'trans'), and to attempt to hide 'trans' people's sex from other people they met in day to day life (such as colleagues).

The link would always remain, and would not even have a pretence of having changed in certain circumstances (such as primogeniture and in some religious settings), and there is a clause in the GRA which allows for a person's actual sex to be know to a limited number of people in limited circumstances.

I hope that Fae drivel gets plenty of publicity - it's always helpful when trans extremists write their green ink threats to researchers and clinicians where others can see them.

The determination of certain adults to ensure that children continue to receive unevidenced, fertility and body modifying medical treatment is very sinister.

There is probably some truth in trans brains being different, BUT TRAs know full well that the majority of trans people aren't actually trans and that if proper diagnosis of gender dysmorphia was allowed then a whole lot of people would be blocked from treatment. They want as many people as possible to transition.

Ray Blanchard and his theories are now controversial because it describes the differences and particular groups of trans people. TRAs just want one large trans group and no scientific research.

We know that internalised homophobia and autism can be real reasons behind gender dysmorphia, and talking therapy would reveal that. That's why they want "conversion therapy" banned.

I don't doubt that gender dysmorphia really exists, but it is very rare, and the majority of transitioners nowadays don't have it.

I’m confused. I thought the TRA wanted equal rights with everyone else. Can anyone think of any other medical procedure where pressure groups would try to block research into it? Surely If more and more kids are transitioning very suddenly, it’s in everyone’s best interests to work out why, and the best ways to support them. If transitioning is as safe and beneficial as is claimed, surely this research will reflect that, and also ways to better support trans youth?

There is probably some truth in trans brains being different [...].

My understanding is that adult male brains are 10% larger (unsurprising, since adult male bodies - and their internal organs generally - are also 10% larger). [Side note: no evidence that this gives men any intellectual advantage :o) ] However, although there are other sexed differences that develop in male and female brains after puberty there is no evidence to support the claims that male-to-female transsexuals have brains that more closely match adult female brains. There are huge caveats, of course: 1) a general lack of data, not least because TRAs have tried to stop it being collected, as a pp has noted above; 2) specifically, it is unclear how the brains of mtf individuals participating in studies have been affected by cross-sex hormones in the first place, thereby blurring cause and effect.

Helen Joyce addresses this somewhat in her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality in Chapter 3, where she writes:

Once the activists are done with demoting sex from an objective characteristic of individuals to a social fiction, it is time for step two: to ‘reify’ gender identity – that is, to turn it from an abstract idea into something concrete. The main argument put forward is that neuroscientists have found a brain structure that is different in trans people, or shown that trans people’s brains look like those of the sex with which they identify.

This is an odd claim to make if you also insist that biological sex is not binary, since you have to know which bodies are male and female before you can group brain scans into male and female and look for the differences. It is equally strange to claim that differences between brains could be a solid basis for classifying people as men and women, but those between genitals could not. Machine-learning algorithms can be taught to classify brain scans as male or female with around ninety-five percent accuracy. But that is far worse than the human eye can do with faces, and worse still than it can do with genitals.

Helen's book is brilliant - no wonder that the TRAs hate her so much.

@TheBiologyStupid Exactly, TRAs block any research into the subject so there can never be anything scientific to go on. And for psychological studies (such as Blanchard) there is a trend to discredit those too, leaving no research and everyone at the mercy of their theories/ideologies.

It is no different to religion, which again blocked any study as it would start to disprove religion's word.

I think there is definitely something in the hormonal doses a child receives whilst in the womb, which is a theory for homosexuality (and you could argue transsexualism is extreme homosexuality), but again the deliberate interference by TRAs would prevent such studies from taking place.

But when you're dealing with people who deny what XX and XY chromosomes mean, what hope do you have?

As of right now I would happily let them slither quietly back under a rock if they'd leave the bloody kids alone.