Interesting view of the Cass Review

[DameMaud]

www.stephsplace.uk/cass-interim-report-review.cfm

Not sure if this has been discussed on here before?
Was looking up summaries on Cass to help me raise questions in a training I'm going to and came across this. Very interesting to read a critical reading of the review (and even more helpful for prep around understanding the POV from those who have a different response to it than me/most of us on here).
Would appreciate peoples' thoughts/reactions.

Great stuff. Thanks @Bosky . Looks like some of these papers might be the source materials for aspects of the Cass report?
I've also now discovered SEGM for more relevant research articles.
It's an odyssey.

Just had the training btw.

Totally ideological and how I expected it to be.

The problem as I see it from this experience, is that it is such a massive divide to bridge; between those who are just empathic, want to be kind, often apolitical, and completely unaware of what's going on, and those whose eyes have been opened.
The journey to get there can be so incremental, and requires a personality that tends to question orthodoxy in the first place.

And I wonder if the only way to get there is that people have to make that journey themselves.

The trainer was very sweet in manner, and there was a vaguely fawning/highly admiring response from everyone to the trainer too.

I could really sense, how or me to directly challenge in the situation, would have just looked to others there, like I was a bigotted mad woman- and most likely counterproductive.

I felt shaky and heartbeaty throughout at the goddam dystopian and overwhelming weirdness of it. And so dismayed at realising how vast the gap was between what everyone else was hearing and reading and what I was.

I opted for the Louis Theroux approach-asking questions with an innocent ' hmmm...isn't this bit beflummoxing' way- highlighting contradictions. Even during this I struggled to regulate my physiological response. But I'm glad I at least did that- and maybe the best that could be done in the situation.
As someone suggested earlier, baby steps.

I noted one other person didn't include pronouns too which took some edge off.

I agree. I always feel the use of ‘young people’ is to make it sound more palatable and give the reader the impression they’re 16-18

From the blog:

"The care of transgender young people is not everyones business - it’s the business of the young person, their parents and their clinician. End of Story."

SAFEGUARDING! Safeguarding, safeguarding, safeguarding.

Safeguarding children is EVERYONE's responsibility. That's the fundamental principle of safeguarding.

If your first priority is not safeguarding children, you should be nowhere near care for children. Medical, social, whatever. And you shouldn't be presenting yourself as some kind of expert commentator either.

Absolutely @FreiasBathtub

Congratulations! You did well💚 💟💜

Looks like some of these papers might be the source materials for aspects of the Cass report?
I've also now discovered SEGM for more relevant research articles.

I am sure they will give you good references. Mine were just first hits on searching for "psychosis gender dysphoria" because I know that there is a well-established link in at least some cases.

Shero 💐

I honestly believe it only takes one or two people in a group to say ‘hold on a minute, are you sure about this?’ to break the spell.

Thanks Clog and Bosky.
Well hopefully, yes. Maybe just a tiny seed of doubt here and there.
I think I will feel a little more robust ie; feel able to ask more questions like that next time too- without such a huge dose of adrenalin/cortisol!

Clymene · Yesterday 17:30
I couldn't read beyond this line: Note : I use ‘young people’ as shorthand throughout, it applies to both children and adolescents, both of whom are people

Me too. Instant alert.

I read this in the Steph's Place UK site someone posted earlier.

The template for human life, the fetus, is female and to create a male requires the mother to release (at around seven weeks gestation) testosterone to make both a male brain and male genitals.

Nature sometimes gets it wrong, and if the testosterone levels secreted in the fetus are imbalanced.

Some experts also suggest that if a mum is very stressed at around seven weeks, the chances of testosterone being imbalanced are increased. Given my families living conditions, I am sure my mum must have been very stressed.

In short, trans people are likely the result of fetal anomalies triggered by hormones and probably influenced by the mother’s stress levels as a secondary factor. Some people do not agree that nature makes mistakes, in which case why do some women miscarry, and some people be born with some mental or physical disability?

I think this idea is a very muddled (I am not a scientist though.) . Also new research (2017) seems to show the ‘default female’ idea is not true.

A new study published in Science by Humphrey Yao, Ph.D. challenges this age-old concept of the female pathway as “default” and shows that the development of femaleness is also an active process. The authors implicated a protein called COUP-TFII as a key player that is required to actively eliminate the wolffian duct in a developing female embryo in order to give it female characteristics.
From:
biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2017/09/its-hard-work-being-a-boy-and-it-turns-out-a-girl/

Some people fail to realise how many red flags start flying every time they weigh in trying to remove safeguarding from children.
It does seem to have become a feature rather than a bug of late.

I was of the understanding that ‘default female’ is really just ‘all foetuses look the same until x weeks of development’ rather than actually being the same until x weeks of development.

it’s a deliberate twisting of the truth to suit Steph’s goal (blaming mum for everything?)

I recently learned that part of the genetic info for male height is on the Y chromosome, which is why adults with CAIS (genetically male but look female and no one notices anything is up until menstruation doesn’t start) are taller than females, and why female transitioners are still of female height, even when puberty is blocked at tanner 2 and testosterone is started much earlier than the NHS has ever done.

and why even starting cross sex hormones on barely pubertal boys doesn’t help them ‘pass’, height wise.

academic.oup.com/jcem/article/86/9/4147/2848612

Always get suspicious at these "interesting" articles on trans issues, which almost always are very pro-trans and very critical of women's rights.

"Interesting" that the website was set up by a number of middle-aged heterosexual male to female transitioners.

If you mean that you are suspicious of the motivation for posting, I am not in this particular case (Advanced Search for previous posts often gives a good guide).

When I first peaked, I too read as many "gender ideology" blogs and articles as "gender critical" because I could not get my head around where they were coming from and what they believed.

What I found was that they are incredibly inconsistent as well as illogical and wishfully misinformed - but it did help me to get a better handle on what was going on.

Until the 2017 research came out, I can confirm that the previous theory was very much as posted and was taught on university courses I attended on Human Biology and Embryology in the 1970s, ie. that the "default" developmental path is female (not chromosomal, embryological) and that the "switch" to differentiation to the male developmental path "stressed" the embryo.

When the previous theory is poo-pooed it always seems to be misunderstood as suggesting that "default female" meant that everyone started off with XX chromosomes and then some foetuses switched to XY - that is not what it was about at all. (I am not suggesting that you have misunderstood it.)

What it was based on is that, despite some embryos being XX and others being XY, that until a certain point in time their embryological development is identical. That knowledge has not changed. What has changed is the assumption, which was based on the best available evidence at that time, that there is a sex-specific "default" and that that "default" is a female developmental pathway.

This "stress at the switchover" was then used to explain a huge variety of circumstances, from sex ratio of miscarriages to delayed myelination of neurones in young boys compared to girls. The latter is assumed to explain some sex differences, like boys generally being behind girls in language development early on.

Theories about stress and hormone imbalance in the mother - and separately the grandmother - affecting foetal development also crop up in the scientific literature about "masculinisation" of the female foetus, "feminisation" of the male foetus, eventual sexual orientation and much more.

The theory that Steph mentions is also only relevant to males who are "feminised" and/or homosexual (usually both) - not to heterosexual males who were stereotypically "masculine" as boys but at some point post-puberty developed an interesting (ahem!) relationship to male conceptions of the female of the species and femininity.

Yes, I can confirm that back in the late 80s early 90s university psychology texts were saying that the female path was the default and that transexualism was very possibly caused by some lack of hormonal exposure in the womb.

So it's not odd that there are still people who think that is current thinking. I've found that in regular university educated people who aren't otherwise all that involved in this discussion, that is the overall belief. It accounts for a lot of the way they approach the issue.

Threads like this are why I love Mumsnet. Testerical articles are carefully analysed with scientists, academics and the rest of us providing evidence, research, professional expertise along with our experiences of being women and mothers to demonstrate inaccurate, flawed and deeply biased writing.
Vital in order to safeguard children from niche adult beliefs that are dangerous to their health and wellbeing.

That's exactly how it is Bosky! Especially when it 'comes to your door' so to speak (eg attending a training)

Think I just titled the thread wrong/not well.
OTOH... It got some fierce ire up (unintended) which helped people laser focus their response- which has helped me. Unintended but useful consequence😉

I find it astonishing that anyone would believe that some imbalance of hormones in the womb would result in male babies with normal physical development, who grow up to be fertile adults, but who decide in middle age that they want to be women.

The idea that the hormones only affect the brain and not the body is ludicrous. And the fact that this usually only becomes apparent after they've fathered children (and a period of cross-dressing) makes it even more ridiculous. But it's obvious why they wanted to create the idea of trans children.

Wow. Cal is pretty much doing a Susie - “quadrupling down” in an attempt to justify her actions.

Bosky, Mangyinseam and OldCrone
thanks for your follow up information/discussion about the possible influence of hormones on people feeling they are a different gender, and the previous teaching about this corresponding with Steph’s ideas.

Steph says they felt they wanted to be like their sister from an early age and cross dressed often from then on. So the desire did not suddenly come on in middle age in their case. Marrying and having children in spite of it is hard to understand though.

There also definitely seems to be a correlation between trauma /abuse/ being in care and children or teens feeling they are in the wrong body. But Steph seems to dismiss this given they say the only cure for dysphoria is transition.

Steph’s suggestion that psychologists proposing any alternative to the cause of dysphoria, other than that the person simply is trans, is a form of conversion therapy is alarming. It just goes to show that the proposal to ban conversion therapy for T would indeed have meant psychological exploration looking being banned.

It is smoke and mirrors: middle-aged, heterosexual males re-writing their personal histories in order to appropriate the HSTS/effeminate male homosexual childhood experience and pass it off as their own.

Without that sleight of hand, the absurdity would be obvious.

This is soooo interesting! I bloody love mumsnet

Ah yes, the oft-observed male late onset transitioner’s retconning of childhood.

big difference between how a little primary school age HSTS type borrows big sister’s outgrown ballet tutu and how a teenager of Blanchard’s other type borrows a female relatives bra.

Hopefully we’ll soon be able to talk about that freely on mumsnet.

big difference between how a little primary school age HSTS type borrows big sister’s outgrown ballet tutu and how a teenager of Blanchard’s other type borrows a female relatives bra.

Perfectly succinct illustration! I'll have to remember that one!:💃vs 👙
(sadly no ballet dancer tu-tu emoji!)