Telegraph: NHS Scotland plans to ‘fast-track irreversible surgery for trans patients’

[ResisterRex]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/14/nhs-scotland-plans-fast-track-irreversible-surgery-trans-patients/

Begins:

"Scotland’s NHS is planning to fast-track irreversible surgeries for transgender patientss_, documents seen by The Telegraph reveal.
An NHS Scotland report, suggesting new transgender treatment rules, calls for “barriers” to gender reassignment surgery to be removed and proposes radical measures to make operations more widely available.
These include allowing GPs, rather than specialists, to send patients for procedures and that a “single opinion” is enough to refer for surgery in most cases.
Trans patients can “benefit” from operations including mastectomies, breast implants and genital reassignment, as well as hormone treatments, even if they do not experience “distress” about their gender identity, it is claimed.
The proposed treatment rules say that a patient’s background or mental health need not be examined in detail before they are referred for the procedures.
The report goes on to call for an “affirming” model of non-surgical care to still be delivered to childrenn_, despite an expert review for NHS England, conducted by the esteemed paediatrician Hilary Cass, raising concerns about the approach."

Scotland is ruled by a crazy deluded party. The NHS is under huge pressure from all directions and they are prioritising trans surgery? Lost the bloody plot

As a parent of a teen girl who went through a T phase….

she was ahead of the curve, wanted blockers and if necessary mastectomy, but was wearing binders to the point it was deforming her.

She grew out of it. Thankfully before any serious damage had been done. Blames the ‘Well-being’ teacher at school for activating her.

Had she gone further and had been fast tracked, against her parents wishes, I assure you, the Nhs would be subject to a very expensive legal battle right now for mutilating my child. At some point, someone with the resources won’t be as lucky as we were.

And the door will be open on child abuse for these sick people who actually are promoting this sickening ideology, which takes advantage of young people who are clearly experiencing a mental health crisis.

We got lucky. She got lucky. Other kids won’t.

I don’t deny there are truly transgender people, and they need to figure out a way to help those who are truly T and not just going through a phase.

The local news tonight went with the awful stress GPs are under.

I wish they’d also mentioned the proposed fast tracking.

There needs to be an uproar. There probably won’t be. The media appears to be muzzled up here.

Nicola Sandwich Humza Roll.

Latest which probably deserves its own thread:

Women's health clinics could be renamed to avoid upsetting trans patients

The proposed guidelines, which are set to be sent to Nicola Sturgeon’s minister for approval imminently, want the Scottish NHS to formally recognise “increasing gender identities for patients”, especially those who consider themselves neither male nor female.

archive.ph/2022.11.15-213523/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/15/womens-health-clinics-could-renamed-avoid-upsetting-trans-patients/

Hopefully GPs will tell Nicola to fuck off. This is way out of their remit.

Bloody hell! The mounting evidence that this is a REALLY bad idea is impossible to ignore. What are they thinking? What would it take to make them see that trying to be more woke than England just for the sake of it isn’t always the best policy? All of this for treatments that have not been shown to have good outcomes overall, for conditions that are mainly self-diagnosed and cannot be tested for or questioned, and that are showing clear signs of social contagion?

People must be trying to get through to NS et al and explain the issues to them. They must be simply refusing to listen to facts.

At this point, if it is removed from any and all mental health issues, why not reposition it as the body modification it is and remove it from the NHS entirely? Let the private sector weigh up the risk of future lawsuits.

This. ^^

It is one of the many, many flat out contradictions everyone is constantly being told to suck up and not question.

If it's lifesaving and necessary to deal with mental distress so serious that the lobby are actually arguing that people with immediately life threatening cancer surgery should not be prioritised ahead, because the risks of both patients dying are equal? Then it is a mental health condition . And a huge and very serious one.

If it is not to do with mental distress, then it is voluntary body modification and should not be the NHS's remit.

There has to be a limit to how much this lobby can have its cake and eat it too. It's losing credibility and sympathy at high speed through all this.

The problem of course is that the lobby would both like the urgency of severe mental distress to gain the wanted priority of consideration, but without having to use the words mental health, because then capacity to make such huge and impactful decisions has to be questioned, along with there being much more NHS affordable and less impactful/possibly regretted treatments to try first to ameliorate the mental distress.

Which is 'conversion therapy'.

But trying to force homosexual females to go straight because sad males isn't.

I swear you could blow a fuse trying to make all this make sense in your head, and the bottom line is that it does not.

Yes. If its not an illness and requires no medical treatment then why on earth is the NHS being made to pay for it?

Dysmorphia isn't generally treated with plastic surgery. Think of all the people who are terribly unhappy over various body parts - they are not afforded cosmetic surgery. Why is this any different? It's not logical.

Did you listen to the Sasha Ayad and Stella O’Malley podcast on WPATH standards of care? They were talking nullification surgeries and how trans has completely moved away from gender dysphoria and has basically become a pick n mix of extreme body modification where nobody is allowed to be judgmental or query anything. Also around the language of medical necessity in that anything a person wants becomes medically necessary. None of these extreme surgeries should be available on the NHS. They are clearly more about want than need.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=aMrCTlp2-Io

I'm not sure if there's a name for the phenomenon, but when people really believe in something wild and are presented with evidence that they're wrong, they double down on their belief.
So eg. people thinking the world would end in 2012. When it clearly didn't, they somehow clung to the belief more strongly (goodness knows how. Perhaps they claim it was the beginning of the end.)
This has got so bizarre that I think this might be the dynamic happening in Scotland and other places. I don't know what the undoing of it looks like. Perhaps there will simply be new people in positions of power and the current lot will believe in the T until their dying days.

Also in Scotland, they plan to charge "the wealthy" for the NHS:

NHS bosses in Scotland discuss having wealthy pay for treatment
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-63659754

I can foresee no issues with fast-tracking unnecessary and unevidenced interventions and charging taxpayers for required, evidenced interventions. None at all

Making all prescriptions free in Scotland was a mistake.
For someone like myself who only has 3-4 a year I’d be happy to pay. Same with the minor ailments thing - I’m happy to pay for hay fever eye drops, decongestant spray etc.
Those on low income would have qualified for prescriptions for free and those having regular meds could do the prepaid thing.

Thanks, I'll give that a listen.

It's such a glaring contradiction I wonder how they've been getting away with it so long. The minute they removed its category as being a mental illness we should have stopped paying for it as taxpayers.

It's such a glaring contradiction I wonder how they've been getting away with it so long. The minute they removed its category as being a mental illness we should have stopped paying for it as taxpayers.

Some conditions are not strictly speaking mental illnesses - e.g. autism and ADHD - but the NHS still gives treatment or medication for them.

But I agree there's more to it than that. Medical transition has sneakily become a kind of human right so that (on the one hand) only an evil society wouldn't contribute to paying for it, but (on the other hand) only a trans person can decide if they need that medical intervention or not, and no-one else gets a say. Not clinicians, not taxpayers, no-one.

I see your point, but the NHS doesn't treat or medicate ADHD or Autism - both of which are diagnosed developmental disorders with set diagnostic criteria and parents/children/adults can wait for years while sufficient evidence and assessment is carried out by a multi agency team. The evidence must be objectively seen in multiple contexts by multiple people involved, and there is very specific diagnostic criteria to be met, to national and internationally developed practice and assessment pathways.

Medication is only provided to treat specific symptoms, often in children as a last resort when nothing else is helping for example anxiety or inability to cope/meltdowns becoming dangerous to the child and others, and it is a LONG process to reach that point. I speak from bitter experience on that.

NHS treatments offered are specific to treat specific, evidenced, diagnosed conditions such as speech and language delays, or to advise on treatment programmes for sensory processing needs if you are very lucky, and tend to be offered only to those very severely affected rather than anyone evidencing need. Many end up seeking private help because they don't meet NHS threshold for help. These needs are medical and developmental evidenced needs within the brief of the NHS, particularly the Community Paediatric teams, that would be treated in any patient showing that severity of evidenced need whether they has ASD or ADHD or not, with clear criteria for at what point the medical need is now resolved and treatment ends.

It's all a bit different and a lot more structured.

@nilsmousehammer I think we're basically in agreement (sigh)

And even if we stopped paying for the "treatment" as taxpayers, we'll still be paying to patch up the harm done to people who buy their drugs and surgery abroad. Wider society has to stop treating transition as a neutral harmless lifestyle choice because it just isn't.

I can't think of any other area where respectable elements of our society go to so much trouble to permit and promote self harm and physical damage.

Nothing can go wrong with this plan I tell you.........(sits back and waits for the lawsuits the start)

You know though, this seems to be an issue across the progressive left, it's not just around gender ideology.

You can see very similar approaches for example when there is a discussion of how to identify or weed out migrants who are being dishonest or have ulterior motives. It almost seems like they can't admit such people can exist, even if the evidence is right in front of them. Even if it's systematic deception.

I suspect maybe the origins of that are from the principle that we are not supposed to punish members of a group as a whole for the bad actions of particular members of the group. Even if we see that the group is disproportionately likely to do something that is problematic.

I've found that when you push people on this, they often struggle with how to parse what kinds of instances of this kind of thing are ok. If any, and often that seems to be the conclusion they come to. An example that is widely seen to be bad is using ethnicity information with relation to crime for things like checks on vehicles or of travelers - even if it is effective. So - the question becomes - how do you draw lines around that? It's not a simple moral argument to make and many people struggle to articulate it in a way that isn't contradictory.

And increasingly I see people who not only will say it is unethical to do anything like that, but actually seem to believe that it is bigoted to admit any such patterns or distinctions exist at all. Even if the evidence is clear and undisputed.

Yes; but middle-aged men asserting that they are women and demanding breast implants, and also the teenaged girls asserting that they are boys/men and demanding breast removal - these two groups are very, very separate. So why are they regarded as the same?