Trans teen ends their life after not receiving gender affirming care

[DysonSpheres]

Article in the mail

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12282819/Noah-OBrien-teenager-committed-suicide-denied-gender-affirming-care-Westmead-Hospital.html

It's a tragic story. I feel very very sad for the young person in question and obviously his parents are in great pain. It seems his dysphoria was dismissed and not specifically treated, but this is phrased as not receiving 'gender affirmation' and I'm not sure what it means in this context it's a bit obscure in the article. In any case, sadly on this occasion the teen did resort to suicide.

Stories like these must be scary to parents with children experiencing gender dysphoria as 'suicide' has been said to be a risk of non-medical affirmation, delaying of puberty blockers etc.

This happened in Australia so I'm not sure what, if any support is available for trans identifying children and/or parents there. Specifically, it seems the child's care was dictated by having gone through puberty. That's the central part.

That poor child. And their poor family.

I'd be interested to know what affirming care means in this situation and how it would have effectively ended all risk in a child with anorexia and dysphoria. Are we talking social transition? Hormones? Surgery? It cannot be a case that children are given such drastic, unplanned, unassessed access to drastic medical treatment on the grounds that if they don't they will harm themselves. Any more than you can say to an anorexic child yes, yes, you can have weight loss surgery and help to starve yourself right now and there, we've ended your wish to harm yourself.

It's a ridiculously naive view of the complexities of the situation, the child's distress will re focus to a new target as many de transitioners have explained, and it's about proper support and management of a child in such acute mental distress. It's like the men are unsafe in prisons thing - yes, it's true, they are, AND this should be addressed urgently, BUT the answer cannot be the political one being pushed for which is 'and so put them in women's prisons'. There are many other ways to keep male people safe, and there should equally be many other ways to help a very distressed teen bent on self harm safe and to relieve their immediate distress while looking into the longer term issue of need and treatment. I do hope we're not going to see this terrible failure of this poor child used for political leverage to achieve a political goal rather than really seek the best care of children in such distress.

And also, as JaukiVexnoydi suggests, this article and the whole narrative around "trans kids will commit suicide without gender-affirming care" and referring to puberty-blockers and trans body-modification as "life-saving care" obviously lead impressionable children to believe that without these things they are destined to commit suicide.

Children being encouraged to think of suicide as inevitable for them if they experience gender distress is incredibly irresponsible. We know from the clusters of suicide in young people that even viewing suicide as doable and a realistic option increases the risk to a child, so obviously the messaging of "life-saving gender-affirming care" and the language used to describe it is going to increase the risk of these kinds of harrowing scenarios taking place.

The other thing that's scary is that if gender distress can be exacerbated by social contagion, and suicide risk can be increased by social contagion, then the combination of those facts with the messaging around "life-saving gender-affirming care" is incredibly dangerous for all of our children and young people.

Gender Identity Ideologues are obviously going to use this case to argue for continued lack of psychological intervention and the acceleration of medical transition with no questions asked, but this case actually shows that the opposite is needed - what is actually needed is early psychological intervention, and for the trans lobby to stop telling kids they're destined to commit suicide.

I suggest anyone who wants to help complains about the phrasing of the Daily Mail article today as the more gender-questioning children see this, the more children are at risk.

Very irresponsible to suggest the outcome would have been any different had the child been given cross sex hormones and a double mastectomy.

I say that instead of the frilly “gender affirming care” for a reason.

Anorexia in teenage girls and wanting to be a boy are two sides of the same coin.

Perhaps a stupid question, but would it even be advisable to initiate medical transition with anorexic patients? Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones put the body under strain so how could this be done safely with somebody who is severely underweight?

I would also expect that a specialist in anorexia would know about the interactions with gender dysphoria. As that specialist has not commented (nor do I ever suspect they will), it seems likely the specialist indicated that the most pressing issue was the anorexia and dealing with it as the child had been hospitalised twice for this.

@Helleofabore Victoria has introduced legislation so that not being gender affirming is regarded as conversion therapy.

And poor Noah’s legacy will not be as a child with a complicated health history whose needs weren’t met, but as a trans child martyr, killed by bigotry.

No doubt there will be vigils and candles, but the truth remains that this was a deeply troubled and confused child whose sad death was the result of their overall mental health, not their gender.

Surely you can't give massive hormone doses and serious surgery to a body ravaged by anorexia. Could a body that underweight even take the anaesthetic?

There’s implication in the article that the anorexia was secondary to the dysphoria. It says the child started to starve to stave off puberty. I wonder whether that is true or if it just fits the narrative better.

But who the fuck is telling these children to do these things? That’s not a normal progression anyone would work out for themselves. Sometimes I hate the internet and the negative effect it’s having on unstable teens.

And of course, if this stupid, affirmative pathway with its damaging puberty blockers and irreversible treatment at a young age wasn’t available, children wouldn’t be damaging themselves trying to attain it.

I'd be interested to know what affirming care means in this situation and how it would have effectively ended all risk in a child with anorexia and dysphoria. Are we talking social transition? Hormones? Surgery?

It doesn't sound like it got as far as the child or family having got as far as discussing the practicalities of what "gender-affirming care" might even look like in Noah's case - it sounds like the message Noah seemed to be receiving from the medical professionals who were available to help was that "there is apparently this magic solution to your distress, but we don't know what it is it how it is decided and so we can't provide it to your ourselves".

I should imagine the fact that none of the medical professionals involved could support Noah to relieve the gender distress without applying psychological principles that might be deemed conversion therapy meant that Noah felt that the one solution they needed was completely out of reach until they reached the top of the "gender specialist" waiting list.

The article in the OP is from an episode of Four Corners on ABC TV in Australia. Here’s a link to it. I don’t know if you can watch it outside of Australia or not. You should be able to. You’ll need to create an ABC iView account to view it.
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2303H024S00

Here's an ABC article about the episode:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-10/transgender-children-westmead-hospital-research-four-corners/102568570

An investigation will now take place into the delivery of gender affirming healthcare in New South Wales:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-11/nsw-gender-affirmation-care-investigation-review/102585936

Incorrect. Those links show self-reports of suicidal ideation - not completed suicide - in adults - not children - who filled in a questionnaire. It’s a self-selecting group of people who completed it and the authors are activists.

It is wrong to speculate on the single trigger for suicide. Completed suicide in children in Australia is rare and suicide reports and coroners reports show no evidence of it being due to gender, or lack of medical care.

In contrast, in the UK Michael Biggs looked at suicide across decades of the patients attending or waiting to attend the Tavistock and found it to be rare.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35043256/

This. IME young anorexic women hate the way their bodies naturally develop — curves, breasts. So wanting to be a boy goes hand in hand with the anorexia for some women. When anorexia has a hold there comes a point where the brain is so affected by lack of nutrition that therapy is useless. I have an acquaintance who has only recently managed to pull herself back from the brink and start eating enough to enable her to receive help from psychologists.

Yes. Heartbreaking story, badly misrepresented in the headline. Poor child.

Agree. But despite the way this article is slanted, the comments show that while everyone has great deal of sympathy and compassion for this child, very few are buying the narrative that 'gender affirming care' was what was needed.

I also take issue with the sentence

"Noah started to restrict his eating in a bid to delay the onset of puberty."

Which suggests this wasn't anorexia at all but a special kind of other eating disorder experienced exclusively by trans children that merely looks like anorexia (the M&S slogan comes to mind, but obviously a child has died).

This is obviously misleading for several reasons, but it also aids the narrative of gender identity ideologues when they dismiss all other mental health issues as being the result of not affirming someone as trans (depression, anxiety, etc).

It's another way of playing on the non-falsifiable nature of gender identity, since when someone argues that a distressed child clearly needs psychological help, they can always say "yes, but the distress is caused by not receiving gender-affirming care", and there's no way to prove that if the child didn't feel they were trans, they would or wouldn't have those other MH issues.

It seems obvious to me that anorexia can often be related to gender distress and the accompanying distress around puberty. Obviously gender distress isn't always present in anorexia, but it doesn't take a genius to consider that there might be a link between different manifestations of psychological distress around one's body.

This sentence seems to downplay the anorexia and it almost seems to be insinuating that anorexia might have been a misdiagnosis because Noah was trans. This is so dangerous for young people and their parents to believe when it comes to conditions such as anorexia, as it is impossible to manage anorexia without understanding it.

Articles like this and the narratives it perpetuates only serve to make medical professionals even more wary of treating gender-distressed children as humans who function according to the same psychological principles as all other humans. The more medical professionals are encouraged to treat gender-distressed children as these mysterious magical alien beings that regular medical professionals are unqualified to treat, the more gender-distressed children will be harmed.

So many of these sad cases have so much beneath the surface. Co-morbidities seem to be seen often; many different issues crashing together at once and the child being convinced to see transition as the only option. What caused the child's anorexia? What was happening at home or elsewhere? What was the family dynamic? I think in future health care pros will be more like investigators, exploring so much more than what was presented. Irresponsible journalism indeed.

The hardest part is trying to diagnose co morbidities whilst in the midst of Anorexia, whilst there is a link between Anorexia and ASD, Anorexia can also result in ASD traits. The same with OCD. In a case like this the difficulties of two medical pathways whilst fighting anorexia would be extremely difficult especially if the gender dysphoria is rapid onset but the anorexia would need to take priority as both medical and psychological treatment needs a close to restored weight. My DD has ASD and is a weight restored anorexic she couldn’t even have birth control in till a period of weight restoration had been achieved. This story is heartbreaking

"Noah started to restrict his eating in a bid to delay the onset of puberty."

When I was a teen this was a common view of anorexia, not because girls wanted to be boys, but because the attention growing breasts bring is horrible and is there anyone who enjoys periods?

Anorexia can also result in ASD traits

No, it can't. There is no such thing as "ASD traits". There is a triad of impairments that have nothing to do with anorexia.

In a sane world where was no gender ideology, can you even imagine an extremely vulnerable teen girl who was restricting her eating sitting in front of a health care team and any one of them saying, 'I know, let's give this child physical harmful puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and a mastectomy? That will help things.'

In a sane world, it wouldn't even cross anyone's mind. Even just because of the risk of osteoporosis before anything else.

The tragedy here is that a young person wasn't protected whilst suicidal and wasn't given adequate mental health support to deal with her feelings towards her perfectly healthy body. What a dreadful situation.

This article breaks Samaritans guidance on reporting of suicide.

It does, but as the article was published as part of the Mail's Australian operation, I wonder if they have anything like the Samaritans guidance in force there.

I agree that this sounds like a distressed teenage girl unhappy with her developing body, as is very often the case with young girls who have anorexia or gender dysphoria.

Here’s some of the Australian media guidelines for reporting about suicide:

Australian Press Council:
https://www.presscouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/SPECIFIC_STANDARDS_SUICIDE_-_July_2014.pdf

MindFrame:
https://mindframe.org.au/suicide/communicating-about-suicide/mindframe-guidelines

Summary of MindFrame by SANE Australia:
https://www.sane.org/images/stories/media/smc_factsheets/1107_media_m9mindframesuicide.pdf

The anorexia is mentioned in passing as a side issue. My niece has just died from anorexia. They are using this poor child as propaganda.

I hadn’t read the comments before, but I’m glad I did. Overwhelmingly they are condemning the transitioning of children and placing more blame on the pressures children are under to consider transitioning because of the current situation.