Alex Massie: The golden rule for Scotland’s Tavistock: see nothing, say nothing, think nothing

[ResisterRex]

Posting for those who would like to read just quickly

The golden rule for Scotland’s Tavistock: see nothing, say nothing, think nothing

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dffaa4b0-abbc-11ed-9cb3-80326348937b?shareToken=4411983868d8a77b64f7d7ea08e2d520

Woah! They're not even pretending that this is medicine anymore. This is tax-payer funded extreme body modification. Wtaf?!

According to the Scottish Pathway for Trans Healthcare (Spath), updated last September, “best practice” has “moved away from psychiatric assessments that focus on evaluating how ‘gender dysphoric’ a person is”. Instead, treatment should consider a patient’s “readiness for initiating particular aspects of gender-affirming healthcare”...

“a trans person can have persistent gender incongruence without distress and can still benefit from gender-affirming hormones or surgeries"

When the law suits come, and they will, they cant say they didn't know.

Great piece as ever by Alex Massie. When all this is over he ought to get some kind of medal for shining a light on this stuff when all around him were ignoring it. Particularly in Scotland.

It is mad that while England is going into reverse over medicalising children, Scotland is ploughing full steam ahead.

According to Spath, “access to hormones and surgeries can act as a prophylactic measure against distress” and “a trans person can have persistent gender incongruence without distress and can still benefit from gender-affirming hormones or surgeries”. Entirely healthy people, that is, should have major body- and life-altering surgery

that’s astonishing. As a PP says, it’s not about treating anything, it’s about advocating for children to have their bodies modified on demand

what the actual fuck?

We have been raising this for years in Scotland but all we get is lies! Stergeon claimed that the guidelines were nothing to do with WPATH but then the NHS put links to it on their website and when it was pointed out that they were also linking to the unich(sp) archives NHS scotland had to report themselves to the police due to the level of csa on the site in question.
Noone has reported on this up her except the times its so infuriating

Hoardasaurus eunuch?

Sorry spelt your name wrong @Hoardasurass

This is the major contradiction in trans care that the cass review is trying to untangle. If trans is a medical condition, then it has diagnostic criteria and a treatment plan. But trans is currently not considered a medical condition- it’s now seen to be a normal aspect of humanity, like being gay. But in that case, if there is no illness then what is being treated and why? The service becomes nothing more, as people have said, than cosmetics on demand.

what is striking is many trans people want an informed consent model where they decide if they want drugs or surgery, for any reason, and a doctor signs off on it. This may be all well and good in America where you pay for health care , but this model simply cannot work on the nhs.

And that model could never ethically work for children, regardless of the way health care is delivered

“a trans person can have persistent gender incongruence without distress and can still benefit from gender-affirming hormones or surgeries"

Ah yes. Hence the coining of 'titty skittles'.

According to Spath, “access to hormones and surgeries can act as a prophylactic measure against distress” and “a trans person can have persistent gender incongruence without distress and can still benefit from gender-affirming hormones or surgeries”.

Fucking hell!!!

So someone who doesn't conform to the regressive gender stereotypes held by our society, but is perfectly happy being themselves should be medicated and operated on - in ways which we know often cause irreparable harm and pain - in order to make them fit the gender stereotypes for the other sex better. In other words, if you won't fit neatly into Box A, we'll damned well make sure you fit into Box B. But it's all progressive rainbows and butterflies, because you get to choose your box

@Tallisker yes that's it my dyslexic brain couldn't spell it and neither could predictive text figure it out 🤣

Really terrible children being damaged by the state.

I dunno if we allow children to decide that they can have medicines and surgery for anything else if they are not unwell

what happened to safeguarding our children

My lovely next door neighbour is waiting for a hip replacement. She is caring for her elderly husband with dementia, so her having limited mobility is severely impacting on both their lives, but it's looking like she'll have to wait another two years.

Meanwhile the NHS has money to spend on hormones and surgeries for people who aren't even in distress?

It's a funny word, isn't it? It took me a moment to work out how to spell it myself

This is simply evil. What does it say of a society that mutilates their children in this way? I hope NS gets sued personally by everyone who has suffered

“We must take these issues seriously,” Nicola Sturgeon said last year, “but we owe it to everybody also to treat these issues incredibly sensitively”. This is code. “Sensitively” here really means “these issues should not be discussed in public”. See nothing, say nothing, think nothing.

This sums up TRSOH in a nutshell.

Thread with links to the SPATH doc etc: twitter.com/JamesEsses/status/1592833984022863873

One on Susie Green and WPATH

twitter.com/4th_wavenow/status/1398404203429703680?s=46&t=v3Tw9RMzeOk0uhNVqQUw2g

And a reply to another thread, referencing WPATH and Susie Green's contributions:

twitter.com/famedtrust/status/1574296930728845312?s=46&t=v3Tw9RMzeOk0uhNVqQUw2g

James Esses on WPATH SOC8:

sex-matters.org/posts/healthcare/wpath/

Pam Gosal MSP tweeting the Massie piece and calling for a public inquiry into the Sandyford:

twitter.com/pamgosalmsp/status/1625408108397830145?s=46&t=v3Tw9RMzeOk0uhNVqQUw2g

"The welfare of children & young people must come first.

I have heard first-hand the harrowing ordeal of premature transition.

The findings of the Interim Cass Review highlight the need for a public inquiry into Scotland’s Sandyford Clinic👇"

Good for Pam Gosal. We absolutely need a public enquiry - no idea how that would happen, given how deeply sunk in genderism Scotland is.

According to Spath, “access to hormones and surgeries can act as a prophylactic measure against distress” and “a trans person can have persistent gender incongruence without distress and can still benefit from gender-affirming hormones or surgeries”.

On what evidence? Where is the evidence that someone without gender dysphoria or any distress about their body will be helped by hormones and surgeries? How would such benefit be measured? Or will it be more like feedback for a private cosmetic surgeon 'on a scale of 1-5 how much did you dislike your nose before? On a scale of 1-5 how much do you love your new nose?' I mean I hope not but if there was no distress before what will be measured? Will it just be a case of if the patient passes better it's good enough for the nhs? This is not medicine is it.

Do we know that the children's clinic is following this model, or is this for adult care only?

Will it just be a case of if the patient passes better it's good enough for the nhs? This is not medicine is it.

Jesse Singal was ripping apart a recent US study, which failed to report on many the things it had said it was going to report on:

If you compare that to the protocol document, you’ll notice that of the eight key variables the researchers were most interested in — “gender dysphoria, depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, self-injury, suicidality, body esteem, and quality of life” — the ones I bolded are not reported in the NEJM paper. That’s six out of eight, or 75% of the variables covered by the researchers’ hypothesis in their protocol document

Having chosen to not report on any of those - or even acknowledge that they were failing to - they did loudly tout an improvement in "appearance congruence" - ie basically "I look more like I want to look like", just as you say.

This past fall I wrote a piece about the problem of researchers in this field touting impressive-seeming findings by relying on instruments that might not mean much. In that case, I discussed adolescent top surgery research where the headline finding was that kids’ scores “improved,” after receiving double mastectomies, on scales that seemed to consist mostly of items asking them whether they presently had breasts. That is, if you ask someone with gender dysphoria to rate their agreement with “I worry that people are looking at my chest” — an actual item from the scale in question — before and after they have surgery, it would be shocking if their score didn’t improve. But that obviously doesn’t tell us much about whether double mastectomies “work” in the longer-term sense we would want a major surgery to work. The paper in question didn’t include more substantive items on the kids’ mental health.

I think there’s a version of that going on here. To be fair, the authors of the NEJM paper also report on some more common and better-validated measures, including ones addressing anxiety and depression, but as we’ve seen, those changes were small, of questionable clinical importance, and didn’t apply to the male-to-female transitioners. Improvements in appearance congruence were experienced by both sexes, and it is the only decent-sized effect the researchers uncovered, as they themselves note.

jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-scientific-transparency-researcher
jessesingal.substack.com/p/the-new-highly-touted-study-on-hormones

Indeed, Arabella. A shame that overarching issues simultaneously affecting all of the nations making up the UK can't be dealt with outside of the devolved arrangements.

How can you medicate for something that does not exist? So you are happy in your 'gender' but it won't hurt to take hormones!