Debate happening in House of Commons: Victoria Atkins on fire

[BonfireLady]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/04/15/rishi-sunak-david-cameron-downing-street-general-election/

Sorry if its not on topic but if people are saying something about someone behind their back and talking about things out of context then other people can say why its not right.

@Whataloadofpiffle

but it isn’t right to try and stop sane adults from making choices about their own body

but this is at the crux of the issue, isn’t it? What is ‘sane’ and who determines it? Because, atm, in a Stonewall-lead drive to provide affirmative care in BOTH child and adult GID clinics in the UK/US - there has been pretty much no investigation into the reasons why a person identifies as trans. If by ‘sane’, you mean emotionally and psychologically well, without a single differential diagnosis contained in the DSM-5-TR - then that does not exist. And certainly not within the patient cohort of any GID clinic in the world. There is, in my or (I think I may speak for others here) our opinion any such thing as a ‘sane adult making choices’ to transition - an opinion shared by many, many fully surgically transitioned transexuals that I have spoken to at length over the last 6 years.

To many of us here, with children and young adult children identifying as trans we can 100% confirm that these children are ‘unwell’. They think transitioning solves their problems - indeed, they've been told it will. But it never does. Suicide attempts (and successes) increase 7x post surgical transition, the sweet spot being about 2 years later.

So, in conclusion - I doubt we will agree on this because the fundamental, core belief that underpins this discussion (for many of us) is that: the desire to transition into the other sex is rooted in deep psychological distress for which, for the tiniest, most desperately distressed number of individuals for whom YEARS of REGULAR in-depth psychological intervention and therapy has not worked, it MAY possibly offer a remedy of last resort. And even then, looking at research/lit reviews of such individuals from 1970s -2000, the outcomes were very poor because the surgery did nothing to alleviate the psychological issues underlying the patient’s distress. (See, for example https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/02/16376/)

If you take that argument then none of us are sane and should be allowed bodily autonomy. What I mean by sane is that the only time you should be depriving people of their free will is if they are so mentally ill they can’t make decisions and could hurt themselves and other people. I don’t think you can apply that to the person others are trying to at all. That is why the obvious attempt to root something out of his childhood began, not because of actually caring but to try and prove he fit the rule. You say they get unhappy at 2 years but he is 16 years on and happier than he was and has a successful career. There are plenty of other people just like him. I just think you can’t stand that someone did something you don’t like and think is always bad and it improved their life. If the kind of extreme infringements on his freedom were forced like you want then you would have ruined any chance of happiness. Just because you don’t approve doesn’t mean you should get to stop other people making a choice. He’s an adult, he has balanced up risks and benefits, he tried many times to be happy as he was and he is perfectly capable of making his own decisions. He isn’t trying to take away anyone elses rights so I don’t get this obsession and attempt to control him. If you do agree with the cass report then why don’t you agree with the evidence there that says gender dysphoria is very likely to go away if it starts in childhood and continues after puberty? Or the evidence showing how low the rate of regret is for things like surgery in adults. Obviously mentally ill people have been caught up in it all and it isn’t a surprise that transition just makes things worse for them but that doesn’t mean that is what has happened every time.

Not going to engage with you further as my previous post made clear we have fundamentally opposing beliefs on this issue.

I would, however, like to point out that ‘if you take that argument none of us are sane’ etc, is an intentionally, wilful misinterpretation of my statement in which I referenced the individuals referred to GID clinics. Of course mentally healthy people, those who are not socially or economically distressed and otherwise coerced, should have bodily autonomy (the right to abortions etc). We are not discussing ‘all’ of us, just a fragile, vulnerable group of young people who have been misled and let down.

That itself was a misreading of your post so I apologise for that. I didn’t realise that you were only referring to trans people in this bit:
If by ‘sane’, you mean emotionally and psychologically well, without a single differential diagnosis contained in the DSM-5-TR - then that does not exist.

Not that that makes it any better though. Still by your definition of sane anyone who has ever had emotional or psychological issues should have their freedom restricted. Want a nose job? Well sorry you have ADHD so you aren’t allowed to make choices about your body. Want an abortion? Well sorry but I believe that is a clear sign of mental illness and some people regret it so nope not allowed. Want a tattoo? Well no not allowed because your parents got divorced so this is clearly just a trauma response. Do you not see how wrong it is to try and exert that level of control over someone elses body because it goes against your beliefs? The only time it is accepted to limit someones freedom is when they are not able to recognise reality and become a risk to themselves or other people. You couldn’t make that argument about the OP or many other trans people for a minute so how dare you try and control what they can and can’t do with their body.

Also you talking about young people when I clearly said that I don’t think children should be allowed to make irreversible decisions about their body is surely an intentionally, wilful misinterpretation of my statement. We are talking about adults and whether they should have control over their body. I find the idea that anyone suffering social or economic distress should have that fundamental right taken away very dystopian and it should be a scary prospect for everyone!

Your belief that every trans person is mentally ill is clearly false. But even then I don’t think mental illness means you should just get to control someone. We accept it as a necessary evil in the very extreme case where someone is say actively suicidal or having a psychotic break because we can see that they aren’t themselves and the outcome will be catastrophic and we know if they are treated they can recover.

Trans people transition because they want to find a way to live with their feelings. Feelings that are so extreme and miserable that they haven’t been able to live a happy life. I don’t think it should be just done on the drop of a hat without proper assessment and counselling but if that has been done like it was for the OP referenced and they have checked that they understand, are mentally capable of making decisions and have proper consent then there is no comparison at all. I have suffered depression most of my life so by your definition does that mean I’m not sane and shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions about my own body?

How dare I? I think you mean how dare you!!

The OP you are referring to is on another thread which I have clearly stated I DID NOT READ and will not a I have a trans child of my own. How you can extrapolate what I have said to be an argument about what an individual I know nothing about on another thread is beyond my comprehension. How does my commenting on this post in anyway ‘try and control’ what that unknown person can or can’t so with their body?

I didn’t even TRY to make an argument about them - really, you need to take a step back and go and pick on someone else. Ideally one who isn’t actually a parent of an actual child navigating this, one who has a degree in Psychology, is a qualified therapist, member of the British psychological society and who has spent 7 years talking with experts in the field, including fully transitioned transexuals, to form an informed opinion on this issue.

I shall leave this thread and hide it now, after reporting you for harassment.

Because it wasn’t a random comment it was in direct response to my comment, one where I was pointing out why those arguments did not apply to the OP. And you responded by saying they apply to all trans people. So clearly you did include OP in that despite admittedly knowing nothing about him, or thousands of other trans people. I haven’t made any comment on your child, I have no idea about that situation. I have also clearly admitted there are cases where there is other issues such as children and severely mentally ill people. Again I am speaking about adults who are capable of making decisions. But you don’t make any such distinction, you spoke about the entire group. You argued for removing their autonomy and those could also be used more broadly to many more of us who aren’t even trans but are in some way ‘vulnerable’ to you. If this is all too emotional for you to talk about then don’t post on a public forum. What you don’t get to do is generalise every trans person and then cry harassment when someone points it out. You are entitled to reply to me and share your opposing opinion but you don’t get to say I’m not allowed to respond to that. And citing qualifications and picking out tokenistic accounts of trans people instead of addressing the actual points raised doesn’t add up to much to me.

What is your opinion on people who want to have one or more of their limbs amputated because of a belief that their bodies are 'wrong' in their natural healthy state?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/feb/06/theobserver.uknews6

Since you seem to believe that people with gender dysphoria are not mentally unwell and that the medical profession should assist them to change their bodies, I assume you would also apply this to people who want to change their bodies in other ways.

I had read some of the AMA but felt increasingly uncomfortable that what the person really needed was professional support, not an open forum on the internet.

Absolutely this, all day long. So I'm not getting into debating it further.

I'm going to keep my comment generic, rather than about the OP of another thread, but to pick up on this point:

He clearly had a lot of assessments and therapy and tried to accept his body before being given hormones and surgery so what do you think should have been done instead?

Anyone who identifes as trans, no matter what age they are, deserves access to evidence-based care and neutral therapeutic mental health support. What's clear from the Cass Report, and the WPATH files before it, is that this model certainly doesn't exist in the under 18 cohort and probably doesn't exist in the adult category. In other words it's more likely than not that anyone who has accessed care in the past has been on an affirmation pathway, where any exploratory therapy has been predicated on the person's trans identity being a start point from which to explore. This is the opposite of the Cass Report recommendations, which caution that social transition is not a neutral act and that affirming a (child's) transgender identity forcloses on the outcome.

The parliamentary debate and the Cass Report obviously focused on care for under 18s. It's good that the NHS has also decided to do a review of the adult care pathway and that the conversation about 17-25 year olds has already started. There's every reason to think that there are adults who are also vulnerable to diagnostic overshadowing. There's also every reason to demand the same level of evidence for medical interventions for adults as is being demanded for children. Anything else is unacceptable medical experimentation.

⬆️👍 I'm also done on discussing the OP of the AMA thread, for this exact reason.

My final comment on it is above and is specifically written as a generic point about vulnerable adults.

Yes. He had such extreme distress he thought about suicide. He tried all kinds of other things like therapy and even powerful mental health drugs. None of that worked. He had reports from psychiatrists and psychologists. The surgeon checked whether there was another reason underneath everything, he made sure the unhappiness was consistently with one part of his body and not part of a wider attempt to have endless procedures and worsening health, he made sure he was mentally capable of making decisions and giving consent and the process was long and very thorough. The patient is now happy, can get on with his life and has no regrets. It wasn’t mentioned in that article but in another one it describes how he tried to burn it so severely it would require amputation. The same article also described how all kinds of standard mental health treatments have been tried with patients like him but then says:
However, the only method that has indicated a relatively consistent and continuous therapeutic effect, according to the data available, has been to acquiesce to the request for limb amputation, altering the body to match the identity.

So yeah until a time that they can find a better way to help people like that I would support it with the right safeguards in place just like for trans people.

When I made an account to run an AMA here I also decided I wouldn't comment on other posts. I felt it was not my place to question the views of others, or try to and centre myself or my feelings in general discussions about trans people.

However, having been made aware of the discussion about me here, I feel compelled to comment. I am uncomfortable with my thread being used to derail another person's. If people would like to know more about me then my thread is still available, and I would much prefer that conclusions were drawn from my own words rather than the interpretations of others.

I did post an AMA publicly and people are entitled to their feelings and opinions on it. I appreciate that it is unreasonable for me to demand that people do not discuss information I shared freely. However, I would like to politely request desistance in this case, because I don't believe anyone is deriving benefit from these discussions and some people have clearly been left very hurt and upset. I also can't deny that it has become very uncomfortable for me at this point. I hope this will not inflame things further and don't wish my request to be seen as an attack on any individual here.

Well said. I can't imagine that was easy to write 💐

Although it's been deleted now, if it's helps to hear it, my understanding of the first mention of your AMA on this thread was that it came from a good place (albeit the wording was perhaps clumsy... hence the deletion), to help facilitate the discussion about the recommendations of the Cass Report. In some ways it did, but on balance it was a universally uncomfortable experience... including for you too 😔

I won't be writing on your thread but I think it's great that you singposted to it from here, should anyone wish to do so. Thank you for reaching out on this thread and I wish you well.

@MAW1993 sorry it was never my intention to make it worse for you, I won’t comment again.

but it isn’t right to try and stop sane adults from making choices about their own body

Just a quick point on this.

There's making choices about your own body and then there is making INFORMED choices about your own body FREE FROM DURESS or the influence of others.

One of the big problem is that the lack of evidence means it is impossible to make informed choices. Instead people are making decisions based on substandard guesses often with significant bias underlying them.

The evidence is starting to suggest that, particularly for females, the side effects of transition are much more widespread and significant side effects and there is a lack of quality evidence that there are long term benefits. Even the comments about stopping suicide don't stand up to scrunity.

Then theres the issue with social media and peer pressure amongst online trans communities with acceptance and being part of the group related to transition.

I don't believe its a question of 'not being sane' or 'being mentally ill'. I think its a case of being fundamentally missold something by Quacks and Charlatans. I think there a huge number of younger people who have issues who are being actively exploited as a means to valid the identities of older man who transitioned AFTER having children and firmly establishing their lives and careers.

I think theres a lot of well meaning people who don't understand the conceptions of consent, making informed decisions and how potent the feeling of belonging to a group or community at that age can mean its very difficult to make good decisions without questionable influence from others.

This is what being vulnerable means. Not being incapable. But being in a position where you may not be in a good place to make such incredibly huge decisions.

Becoming trans is sold as a magic bullet, and I think for many there is a slow realisation that you spend a huge about of your life and energy leading up to transition and this doesn't really reflect the reality of it.

I think older women are particularly atuned to this dynamic because of their own experiences. School can be tough if you don't fit in, and then there is the almost feeling lost at sea when you leave school and this process of trying to 'find a tribe'. You certainly go through life stages, where your late teens and early twenties is characterised by a need to be accepted and liked and to fit in. This definitely changes as you get older. You don't value that concept in the same way. What was incredibly important to you as a young adult compared to your late thirties and beyond.

A friend of mine showed me a sheet that I'd for her written aged 18 last week. It was about all the things I loved and were important to me. OMG is it dreadful and so so immature. Its was incredibly cringworthy. We had a good laugh about it. There's no way I was capable of really and truly being able to make that level of decision at that age. Not really. So I'm not saying something about others that I don't think about myself. At that time I had a big complex about hating being a woman and wanting to be a bloke and how I'd be taken much more seriously and respected more etc etc. I do think theres a fairly good chance if I was part of this generation, I'd have looked into that. I was very much into the internet and was an early adopter of online communities meeting people years and years before it became commonplace.

Thats why I find it so sad. I think there is a huge amount of this which is about normal development into adulthood and this right of passage about 'finding yourself' which isn't unique to or restricted to lgbt identities. Instead its been marketed in a particular way to particular groups - as I say, to effectively exploit them.

If it was truly about informed decision making about your own body I would respect that. That is my ultimate issue - this is not possible to do so for a large number of this cohort.

I fundamentally believe in good quality evidence based medicine and robust safeguarding free from ideological bias.

I don't think that exists.

I see it more like a cult. It is hard to see how the cult is mistreating you whilst inside a cult. It is hard to escape a cult because of the social bonds used to entrap you and coercively control you. At no point would I say that someone in a cult is mentally ill. I would say they are being abused and exploited though. It can take years to escape a cult and the lengths people will go to whilst in a cult are extreme and defy all logic or rational.

I've done this to death about what the parallels and warning signs about trans activism and cult like patterns are before so I'm not going to do it again.

There is this idea that people in cults are stupid. It's not true at all. People in cults are often very intelligent, very capable people but are looking for 'something' that is 'missing' from their lives. This makes them vulnerable.

We don't tolerate cults for a reason. Because of their abusive patterns.

Likewise abused women are often framed as stupid or naive. Or even working class against a superior middle class who it could possibly happen to. Again it's not particularly true. There is a desire to be loved and validated that's weaponised and used against women from all kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds.

Have been following the new additions to this thread and thought I might add my two pence worth.

Firstly we have responses that fit in with “be kind” narrative when confronted with a trans identifying human beings, and the particular experiences as described by them. Fair enough.

Blanchard in an interview on Glinner’s YouTube, helps me out there. To paraphrase he stated that it was a last resort treatment for the most dysphoric of cases, and that it was not a cure, it was an alleviation of symptoms of distress.

To me if you have such an extreme disconnect between your mind and your whole body, then you are not “whole” emotionally speaking. So it has to be a mental health issue.

Not liking one’s nose, bum, breasts etc, is something mostly, we all learn to live with. But it seems to me to be a mild version of the extreme, which is not liking one’s body in its entirety.

So I think it must be a mental health issue.

So what causes such an extreme disassociation of one’s entire body. Cass helps us here when you look at the data on who are referred to GIDS.

But more widely children are now exposed to this concept of opting out of the sex one has been determined to be. And what comes with that is gender stereotypes either way you look at it.

As for adult, middle aged males “coming out” that is a whole other story line. Fetishisation of women's body, so what is the root of that?

I have read Debbie Hayton’s book and have had e mail conversations with him, and he has willingly interacted with me.

He regrets his transition and is very critical of the “klicky heals” male dressed in a silly outfit.

Having worked in sexual and domestic violence for many years, i am with Arabella Scott.

I think body dysphoria is a personality disorder, generated by a variety of sorry childhood experiences, and as sad as it is, it should not be, normalised.

Most of us do not wish to be mean.

Thinking aloud on this thread has been very helpful to me.

I was a bit swings and roundabouts… not so much now.

It's weird.

My brother told me 'its not about gender stereotypes'. So why exactly are you putting on a fake voice, wearing short skirts and heels and acting in a simpering passive manner!? If it wasn't about gender stereotypes you could just wander around as you are and you'd be read as female. Cos you are female. Or some other nonexistent logic which is quasi-religious.

My brother told me it was a mental health issue too. So why are rates of poor mental health so high? Causation or correlation? And if you transition your mental health improves? Right? Otherwise what the fucking point in going through all the physical agony and side effects?

Then there's the fact there's very clearly autism in my family. No one diagnosed but my grandfathers behaviour which my dad found out about after his death included keeping lists. My parents were shocked at how bad and obsessive it was. For decades. And my uncle has a whole pile of traits and still lives with his mum at nearly 50.

Why do we assume it's being trans rather than a normal part of being autistic which doesn't require body modification. Mainly because the body modification doesn't change your sex nor does it change the fact you may be autistic.

So I'm all kinda over a number of other possible explanations tbh.

It's pseudo religious bollocks to fit the agenda and beliefs of someone with often no foundation in reality when you look at things properly.

@RedToothBrush I get what you're saying.

The way I think of it is that a belief that we all have a gender identity isn't a mental health issue per se. It's a belief that not everyone shares. Many people hold beliefs that others don't e.g. a belief in god or reincarnation. Beliefs explain the "unknowable" and are also dismissed by anyone who accepts the unknowable as a non-issue.

As an example, I believe in ghosts. How do I explain ghosts, as entities (souls?) that are separate from the body? No idea. I can't. But I'm OK with that and I won't expect others to share by belief.

Setting aside transgender identities, many people hold a belief that everyone has a gender identity because they accept that they "feel in alignment" with their sex, they just don't know why.

All beliefs are challenged by science and observable reality. In some cases, a belief can lead to extreme outcomes:

It becomes a cult where the belief is enforced as a truth, where performing adherence to it is mandated and deviating from it is punishable by being ostricised.

It becomes a mental health issue where the belief leads someone to harm themselves (or others), because it is held so deeply that it has masked other underlying reasons why the person might want to take this action.

The Cass Report recommendations don't challenge the belief in gender identity, or address the potential of cult influence on believers, but they do address the mental health side of things. They start with the premise that it's important to understand why someone has developed a feeling that they are in the wrong body. It's not about challenging whether the belief that we all have a gender identity is valid or not, as many people will continue to believe it is true, it's about looking for and addressing the co-morbiditities that could explain why someone is "out of alignment" with their own body and have likely been overshadowed diagnostically.

From the content of the final report, Dr Cass is clearly a believer but wants to address the pathway to harm that can accompany the belief.

Ps I'm not sure if I've derailed my own thread now. Possibly 🤦‍♀️😂😬

I would argue it's not within the scope of a medical report to argue with or against beliefs. It isn't necessarily qualified to assess whether something is a cult or not because that's probably another field of expertise.

As this website says, because the definition is ambiguous, it's better to focus on harmful behaviours:

https://www.icsahome.com/elibrary/faqs#h.p_ID_160

Hi bonfirelady, i get what you are saying but, i think the mental ill health or vulnerability comes before the “belief” develops.