Mysterious drop in GIDS Waiting List…

[NitroNine]

From TwiX (name of newspaper not given):

Waiting list Sizeable drop
During the last 18 months, staff have been baffled by what appears to be a drop in the numbers on the waiting list.
After the announcement was made in 2022 that Gids would close, there were about 7,000 people on the waiting list, but the current figure being cited is 5,000 - a reduction of 2,000 patients in a period in which, clinicians said, no patients were removed from the list to be seen by staff, but more would have been added.
At the point the list was given to NHS
Arden and GEM in November 2022, there were around 300 new referrals per month, staff said, so if that continued there would now be about 10,000 on the waiting list.
Yet it stands at half of that. Some of these will be 17-year-olds who were moved to the adult waiting list, but this, staff said, would not explain all of that potentially 5,000 drop.
NHS England said only those over 17, any duplicate names or those who asked to be were taken off the list.

Truly a mystery 🤔

I expect some trans, and some (probably most) will desist at some point without any harm being done.

Jolly good. What about the ones where harm is done?

David Bell, when being interviewed on the PM programme, was very clear that there is no such thing as a “trans child”.

Some children can say that they are trans because it's fashionable to be edgy and not a boring cis-het. For them, it will be very transient, and no harm will happen. Some will have other issues, of mental health or not - anxiety, bullying, ASD, budding homosexuality - and will confuse their mental distress with the necessity to transition. "Social contagion", though, doesn't mean that you transition because it's trendy. Social contagion refers to the same mechanism by which anorexia, bulimia, self-harming, have spread through the (predominantly female) population. Obviously the stop to the prescription of puberty blockers is good news from this point of view, but if there are no professionals helping these teenagers, who will help them to understand if they really need hormones at 17? (This assumes that a very small percentage does really benefit from transitioning - in reality, I tend to doubt it - NICE found the evidence low quality EVEN for hormones in adults. But you never know, maybe more data will clarify things).

Respectfully I disagree.

There is plenty of evidence that TRAs, especially those who have undergone surgical intervention, are actively working to encourage mentally vulnerable young people to do the same. If you look at social media channels like JammyDodger, CuriousSeahorse, and also at the 'egg cracking' subreddits and on Discord, you will see a clear commitment to encouraging unsure and vulnerable children onto, first PBs (with the false promise of reversibility), then hormones (with the false promise of reversibility) and finally onto surgery (with the false promise of a successful outcome, which is NOT currently medically possible. It just isn't.).

My belief has always been that gender dysphoria is a form of body dysmorphia in the way that eating disorders can also be. There's no such thing as trans children, just mentally ill children. And they will not be helped by unnecessary and damaging experimental sugeries. They will be helped by early and efficacious psychological intervention, especially DBT, which is rarely offered on the NHS because it's difficult and time consuming to provide well, but is life changing when done properly.

Let me stress there are STILL thousands of kids who HAVE been caught up in trans trending in their social group. What is trendy in one social circle can be the height of unfashionable for another. But the point is it is still a trend.

And for those thousands caught up in it there are social implications to their family relationships and their social relationships and to their academic performance and relationships with authority at school before we even talk about the medical implications.

It pisses me right off to say that these kids don't matter because there's not that many of them. This doesn't stop this being a huge medical and safeguarding scandal.

We don't go 'oh well only 10000 infants were affected by thalidomide use during pregnancy do we?

Fucks sake. Get your head out your arse and give a shit about these kids cos so many people don't appear to. They are just collateral damage to justify the existence of late transitioning males.

'Without any harm done' is a massively disengenous comment and I'm sure the parents of kids who detransition would have few choice words to say on that - even those who never medicalised.

Comparing cross-sex hormones to asthma medication & unable to see why GPs are so willing to prescribe inhalers even after long gaps in treatment but they won’t pony up the drugs it would be unethical for them to.

Zero understanding of their own medication; & somehow even less comprehension of the fact GPs prescribe (& indeed pharmacists dispense) within the bounds of both ethical & legal frameworks. Not operating outside the scope of your competence is a big thing in the medical profession; & while GP competency is of course wide-ranging, that’s not the same as boundless!

I wonder if perhaps there’s something unusual about what was requested; & that caused not only the refusal to prescribe, but the offer to refer back to specialist services that was in turn refused. I’ve seen similar behaviour - not over CSH, but other medications 🤔

Apologies for double quoting you but I also just wanted to pick up on your statement:

"We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this"

This is false and suggests a profound ignorance of the modern Western scientific process.

In Western medicine we still adhere to the prinicple of 'do no harm' and this is backed up by a huge body of medical law which prevents surgeons in particular from carrying out surgeries which do not follow a standard protocol and have a small range of anticipated outcomes. Where complications are anticipated there's usually a widely agreed response.

In the area of experimental transgender surgery all this has been thrown out the window. Children and adults have undergone unnecessary and life changing surgeries such as double mastectomy, the removal of vital arm and fat muscle, experimentally stitching flesh and skin onto their mons pubis, the flaying and destruction of the penis, and much more. Some of these surgeries have led to permanent disability and, likely, a shortened lifespan.

There is NO other area of modern western medical/surgical practice where it would be acceptable to 'experiment' on patients' anatomy with the blithe assurance that "We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this."

For example if a surgeon performed an entirely experimental animal skin graft on a burns patient, with the knowledge that the protocol had not been approved by regulators, subjected to peer review, practsied, and all outcomes planned for, she would be imprisioned. She would not be able to use as her defence in court "We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this" because that is not how western medicine works, thank Goddess.

Apart from in transgenderism, where vulnerable and mentally ill adults and children have been experiemnted upon and left permanently altered and disabled.

I want all of these vulnerable and medically damaged people to get justice. I'm aware that there is at least one large class action underway in California and I look forward to following its process eagerly as it will likely provide a pattern for eventaul public prosecutions in the UK.

@CantDealwithChristmas

This is false and suggests a profound ignorance of the modern Western scientific process.

Quite right. The entire fields of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy are in the middle of a giant crisis of reproducibility so it's already pretty credulous to take their pontifications at face value, let alone base medical treatments on it.

Pretending that normal feelings of bodily anxiety, and the not-so-normal feelings (dysmorphia) are somehow the result if a gendered sould prevents us as a society, and also the medical community, from understanding what is really going wrong and how to actually solve it.

An entire generation has been failed by those supposed to protect them.

IIRC Monty was on hormones via GenderGP (lots of muttering about temporary lack of access to hormones when the Liverpool based pharmacy partner was in trouble a few years back) and lots of GPs refuse to work with GenderGP customers now, even if they did in the past.

I expect Monty’s NHS GP has decided not to prescribe cross sex hormones can unless in a shared care agreement with an NHS gender specialist, which Monty doesn’t have due to using GenderGP (followed by surgery in Thailand).

Now that GenderGP has fallen apart at the seams increasing number of their customers will be approaching NHS GPs and asking them to take over GenderGP prescriptions.

I know two who have not yet medicalised where their entire family life has been turned upside down. I think that many people who make that 'without any harm' underestimate just how much harm is done by social transitioning.

Or even just transition ideation.

Gender distress is a massive family disrupter.

Lucky you.
I checked in with my teenager a couple of weeks ago.
At the end of a very difficult conversation I had established that 3 of her 4 closest friends identify as boys.
If the trend is over, they haven't seen the memo.

My teen still has some close friends who are still identifying as either the opposite sex or as non-binary still too. But most of my teen's new friends in sixth form and outside school have no trans identities.

Are they year 8/year 9? If so, IME that’s the peak point and then they slowly desist one by one.

Sadly there will always be a few who don’t feel able to change course until
they reach 25 or so (fully formed brains).

I think there has been a reset. I had some involvement in specialist commissioning in 2008 ish (prior to the conservative / Lansley reforms).

The conversations at that time were about supporting a what was then very tiny minority of children on the right pathway, with the right psychological support. Because of the way the provider/commissioner split worked at that time, specialist providers had a lot of input into pathways as they were seen to be trusted experts.

As we know, a lot has happened since then. GIDS type providers are no longer seen as trusted professionals but as gullible enablers who lacked critical, judgement. It's also patently obvious that there was a Ponzi style widening of referral criteria to keep bringing in new entrants so that the money kept rolling.

But crucially thanks to various sportspersons, legal cases and JKR, the Emperor is naked and gender identity is no longer the topic we cannot discuss.

Teens - who mostly just want to fit in with their particular tribe - can see for themselves that puberty blockers & cross sex hormones don't achieve the results their exponents claim. When something becomes a joke, it stops becoming desirable.

The group I feel so desperately sorry for are those who started the journey to transition under false promises.

My experience is that there are substantial variations. Sometimes it's regional (and it can look as if some of this is a proxy for the number of looked-after children there), sometimes even in the same area, it's concentrated in particular schools and it may even follow particular staff appointments.

This is one of the occasions when a contextualised heat map would be useful.

They are year 12.

Yes, that would be useful!

IME it was a influential adult in school that kicked off a massive wave of trans identification but most kids moved from school to sixth form college in year 12, so the adult was no longer influential.

I suppose it could easily have affected them at an older age if the influential adult had been employed at the college rather than the school.

Our family FtM seems to have lost interest in it but is still using boy name, presumably because she made a massive foot stomping fuss about changing it at 16 and can’t easily turn around without admitting being wrong. No one is being corrected re: using birthname or female pronouns and the binder has been binned (now age 17.5, started at just gone 13),

This is a long shot but has anyone archived the screenshot from Mermaid's website where it used to very clearly state that the vast majority of gender-questioning kids would desist as they got older?

Someone has shared it here in the past but unfortunately I didn't save it.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4032857-Mermaids-and-the-evolving-understanding-of-gender-identity

is it in this thread?

The secrecy and the determination to prove "it's not a phase" are roadblocks. I can see desistor stories by girls who had surgery, but not from social-only kids.
There are lots of films/ series with trans characters- are there any with detransitioner storylines?

@KellieJaysLapdog thank you, I'll have a look now!

as a general note I find the best way to look up older material online is to use the post code that an org was using at the time period, so before Susie Green moved it up to Leeds they were using the same PO Box as Press for Change, FtM London, Beaumont society etc.

So searching for ‘mermaids WC1N 3XX’ brings up some pre Susie links:

https://www.google.com/search?q=mermaids+WC1N+3XX&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari

?

Highlight on that image is via Glinner:

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/before-susie-green-arrived-mermaids