How are you feeling today if you work in healthcare or a captured organisation?

[Citrusandginger]

Following the publication of the Cass report?

I'm a senior HCP and have been carefully emphasising the need to record sex medical accurately for months now, and have received, what I take to be, knowing looks and quietly supportive nods in return.

So I'm not out out, but I am sure that people are aware of my views. I'm also certain that I'm not alone.

Looking at social media today, I've seen people from my network posting media articles, but so far no comments.

My hunch is that a lot of us would like to discuss the issues publicly and in our own names, but are still hesitant because the debate is likely to remain toxic for a while, and could still impact our careers (and distress some patients).

Just wondered what other people's thoughts were and what it would take for you to speak out?

@DameMaud

Yes, they’re both on my “acceptable sharing within the NHS list”. (I have a different list for other sharing.) There was also the useful summary of CASS that someone shared, for those who won’t read the full report.

Considering all the safeguarding training the NHS makes its staff do and all the while some of the biggest cases of child abuse was happening in expensive publicly funded NHS clinics in plain sight. It beggars belief.

We have sex differentiated ‘red books’ because boys and girls have different growth trajectories from the get go! It’s as if some people have completely forgotten reality.

When i get a minute to think about it, the way people seem sincere in their beliefs baffles me....
But we don't have a minute.
School is back on Monday.
Maybe the kids are going to maintain the omerta, but I can't see it holding. If we grownups don't set the agenda, and the tone, what the kids say will be unpredictable.
I'm hoping for some guidance at 8.30 staff meeting, and a whole school assembly.
Heads in sand is more realistic tbh.

So if we wanted to write to our children's schools about this, can you point to the part in the Cass report that talks about social transition? My kids' schools (both of them) buy heavily into the ideology. One reason I didn't send my dd to my ds's school is that they let boys (who say they are girls) into the girls loos.

My dd's school (which is a girls school) is full of pronouned girls, and a friend of a friend had a dd who said she was a boy without her knowing (because the school didn't think they should tell the mother - she found out in an awful way).

fwiw, my sector is still the same as it was pre-cass - completely captured.

@HelenHywater as a first pass on social transition, https://segm.org/Final-Cass-Report-2024-NHS-Response-Summary this link from SEGM summarises. I'll go back and re-read the sections and will post the pages later.

Went on our NHS trust’s intranet today to see if any comment on the Cass report as usually something when a significant review is published. Nope nothing, still awaiting my new name badge declaring my preferred pronouns, ffs can someone just stop this sh*t

@HelenHywater the social transition secton is chapter 12 of the report - not too long so worth looking at.

Key messages include a benefit for children of using preferred name.

Limited good evidence of benefit or of harm of social transition where parents are involved.

Evidence of increased stress and anxiety in children who are living 'full stealth' and in my interpretation this is worst when the children do this full transition before puberty- they end up in fear of being 'found out'.

In general, children thrive when their families are involved and social transition without parental inclusion is not recommended.

I think it's very important not to overstate what the report says. Advocates will leap on any attempt to use it for an agenda it doesn't support.

Me too.
Nothing....

Staff at NICE, NIHR, HEE, MHRA, HDR UK, and NHS need to stop the use of pronouns in their signatures. They need to stop "people with ovaries" and other such usages.

Until they do, they've picked a side in the support of, or opposition to, evidence-based medicine.

RethinkingLife my NHS paediatric dept has just been sent back a new batch of name badgers because they didn’t have preferred pronouns on them so they can be put on. I’ve decided to continue using my old name badge minus pronouns and see if anyone comments quite looking forward to quoting Cass if they do

It also recommends, as a maximum, 'partial transition' but i can't find a definition if this. Am I being thick? Any ideas? What implications would this have in a general medical environment or in schools?

Partial transition “may be a way of ensuring flexibility”, the review said, adding that appropriately-trained clinical staff should advise on the risks and benefits of social transition “referencing best available evidence”. It warns parents must be careful not to unconsciously influence the child's gender expression.

Daily Mail uses same definition as others and doesn't involve archive links: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13288717/Everything-need-know-sweeping-400-page-Cass-report-including-set-four-years-ago-happened-since.html

According to Shropshire Star she also says this:

On the suggestion of partial transition for young children and what this means, she suggested in some cases someone might be transitioned at home and not at school.

Thanks, but I'm still a bit hmmm. Transitioned at home - friends come over to play, or for older kids, going out to town etc, different 'degree of transition' seems very confusing. It seems like an unworkable fudge.

I like a protocol, me!

I like a protocol, me!

I can't disagree. My preference is for a straightforward, unambiguous pathway and protocol.

However, I don't know how else Cass could have written this and kept the many stakeholders on board and willing to engage with the process.

Actually I think transition at home but not at school makes sense.

It puts it firmly in the arena of identity exploration in your own space and time but not something others in public formal arenas are expected to indulge or play along with.

This has long been the attitude to adolescent identity exploration: express your identity through your fashion choices and hair styles at the weekends in your peer group, but don't bring it to school or work. At school you follow the same rules as everyone else.

Parents usually just roll their eyes and ignore the extremes of this identity exploration which is taken very seriously by the teenagers. As they know it's developmental. It's a stage which will pass.

That's the approach we should as adults have taken to this gender expression idea all along.

Instead of calling it social transition, fixing it as an identity and making everyone pretend it's real instead of just a new expression of normal developmental experimentation.

Those levels of intimidation are definitely very high, yes. I was just surprised that even the clinical professors have been cowed, because they’ve never been cowed by anything else. If anyone could beat this it would be them. I’ve worked it out though- it isn’t the university they’re scared of, it’s the NHS. They can influence and veto university policies but they can’t influence the juggernaut that is the extremely captured NHS, and they have to work within it or they have no clinical career.

Our trust is very captured. Managers and clinicians who are very gender focused pepper their language with compassionate, engagement and inclusion but their actions are to ruthlessly root out the employees who don’t or won’t sign up to their doctrine without question

Jo Bartosch captures my perspective very well.

For all her nonsensical equivocation about toxicity and extremes on all sides, Cass clearly understood that if the messenger was to be shot, it would be a trans activist holding the gun.
And Cass has every reason to be concerned. Her detractors are not confined to the activists who are even now planning a demonstration against the implementation of her recommendations — the entire NHS is in effect enemy territory.
Today there is a legion of activists within the NHS; some organise internally within workplaces, whereas others like GLAAD are networked across the UK.
**
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-cass-review-is-not-the-end/

I work in an NHS trust. They have put out a statement saying that they recognise that colleagues may need 'additional support' and 'a safe place' to discuss how they are doing and the impact of the report. This includes our trans colleagues, friends and those with trans children. They have suggested reaching out to talk, and posted links to Mermaids and Gendered intelligence.
No mention of any acknowledgment of the report findings, protecting children etc. I'm really quite shocked.

@SoVeryTiredAndEmotional

Shocking. Is this something you might be comfortable about emailing the Health Secretary about?

I’m a former HCP who now works in a school. 3 weeks ago I emailed the head of safeguarding my entire thoughts on gender theory.

I feel absolutely GREAT!!

@lemonstolemonade I have been stewing on it all week, and would really like to respond to someone in the hospital at the very least. I’m just not sure where to start. I don’t think I’d be able to coherently get my point across (and, probably more importantly, but very frustratingly, I worry about their response and my job!)
Is it something the Health Secretary would be interested in?

Supply Teacher. Some schools are more captured than others. I worked at one long term until I was time-tabled to teach PHSE . The power-points were appalling.
The pupils knew it was all clap trap and would always point out the obvious science but the school invested to be a Pride school.
At another the librarian ( male and straight) was telling Y7 male pupils that if they liked girls they were lesbians and that sex isn't binary.
I completed a My Concern form. Tumbleweed. And I checked for updates as we are required to do.
This same librarian wanted to spend some of 'his' budget on Trans Story time for his 'favourite ' pupils( announced to all the Yr7s ) rather than an author or poet visit that would benefit a year group.
Complaints about his use of the library budget rattled more cages than my MC submission about his use of 'favourite pupils' and Trans Story time.
I'll be leading with ' With reference to the Cass Report' in all future MC referrals from now on.

Join SEEN. The more of us who do, the more we outnumber the TRAs curbing free speech.

Especially after Cass. Did you see Victoria Akins yday in Parliament slamming GI? Rosie Duffield basically got a standing ovation.

’there a decades where nothing happens and there a weeks where decades happen’.

this is your week ☺️