Hilary Cass Interview in the Times

[Igneococcus]

Depressing that she doesn't feel safe in public anymore:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3121a27a-fd54-46d9-894a-f715de429675?shareToken=323bde6f9666d56951b1eb073ded85b1

Spot on as usual Datun.

For anyone reading along, I recommend that if you feel moved by the posts of this male poster above, that you use advanced search and read their own words over the years they have posted here.

There is continued dismissal of the current female cohort, it is kind of datun to describe it as a lack of curiosity. The cohort change was such an inconvenience to the male adults who are so heavily invested in this ideologically driven concept of gender while at the same time being all too convenient for the support and spread of that concept throughout society.

This ultimately will be the downfall, I feel. The foundation was never solid and based on provable material reality. It was always built on philosophical belief that is changeable, and malleable over time.

When that philosophical belief is so enmeshed with the ego of humans, it was never appropriate to form the policies for medical treatment that resulted. Extreme body modifications to fit a person’s view of themselves at that moment in time based on dysphoria? FFS! Who ever thought that should be supported on national health systems around the world?

Was that Dr Erica Anderson?? The clinician in San Francisco?

RethinkingLife
MN search is beyond abysmal.

I'm so glad it's not just me.

If you are conceived male, you are born male - a baby boy. If you survive to adulthood, you are a man. Having a male body and being a human is being a man. No pretence is required. Be as feminine as you like. Being a man doesn't rule out anything except the reproductive functions of a female human being.

But there is no way to turn a male body into a female body. I'm sorry for anyone who finds that fact impossible to live with but it remains a fact. Being a man and calling yourself a woman is the pretence.

The other issue is that Butters really can't eliminate the placebo effect and the sunk costs issue precisely because Butters is so emotionally invested in transition.

If Butters did start to question the medical experimentation they've been part of then what happens?

But this demonstrates precisely why those experimented on are often not great at assessing whether something truly is beneficial and why we need proper impartial research based on evidence.

Thanks for engaging in what appears to be good faith.

I agree that I can't speak for everyone, but nor can Ritchie Herron and Kiera Bell and yet their highly subjective and rare negative experiences are being treated as authoritative and representative of all of us. Keira Bell's personal anecdata was apparently good enough to launch the legal challenge that has, four years later, resulted in the publishing of a report that effectively ended the provision of a treatment that has already benefited hundreds of people despite admitting that it was clearly beneficial for some of them.

The situation as it stands is that a treatment pathway for a small subset of society has been restricted as a result of these recommendations where before it was theoretically (though less so practically) available. This is a significant and sweeping active change that is already having a direct negative effect upon the young people for whom it serves as a lifeline, yet this active change is presented as a passive, cautious measure.

The historical choice of language when it comes to study quality classifications and the way that this choice influences perceptive skew is actively unhelpful when these studies enter mainstream discourse. 'High Quality' and 'Low Quality' do not mean what they appear to when they appear in headlines and press releases. It's not clear that a 'High Quality' study can ever realistically be expected to be conducted on this particular subject and that isn't an uncommon state for many areas within paediatric care.

There are also questions - which Cass expends a fair portion of her report on - regarding what many of the studies and the reviews that have collated their findings are actually assessing. The evidence is overwhelmingly strong that GnRH analogues are an extremely effective way of temporarily suppressing puberty, yet they seem to be being assessed on their ability to deliver unrealistic mental health results to young people who know all-too-well that they are merely an initial, conciliatory first step in a much longer process toward resolving incongruence.

You fear that the absence of evidence means I am in the minority in having a positive experience of this treatment; that there is a silent and invisible cadre of detransitioners just waiting to come out of the woodwork. But there is no evidence for this.

I know it has had a positive effect in many invisible people with whom I am acquainted. It is thus critically important that we talk about our experiences otherwise the voices of Keira and Richie will continue to dominate the public narrative as they have come to do over the last few years, and that will continue to present an unrealistic picture of the reality of our lives.

You fear that the absence of evidence means I am in the minority in having a positive experience of this treatment; that there is a silent and invisible cadre of detransitioners just waiting to come out of the woodwork. But there is no evidence for this.

Setting aside your other assertions, where is your evidence for your claim?

Why did Viner (?) not publish a case study about you or at least record something with the citable value of grey literature?

Are your case notes available to you?

Have you approached a journal with the offer to write up your own case series or just a case study?

I know a similar example. The former airline pilot who was a pilot during the decades when women were not permitted to be airline pilots, had a heart attack aged 60ish, returned to the workplace identifying as a member of the opposite sex, and then got paid by their airline to be their trans ambassador.

Guest speaker smugly enthroned at the front of a room full of young women, said that this airline “had always had a women pilot, they just didn’t know it”. Then explained that the new (post-heart attack) role with the airline involves encouraging girls to consider becoming pilots by telling them: “Women can be airline pilots too, you know. Just look at me.”

So an individual who found it perfectly possible to “live as a man” when only men could be airline pilots suddenly found it no longer possible to live as a man once their career as a pilot was at risk due to ill health - what a surprising timing coincidence, that was - now gets paid to go round schools gaslighting girls.

I suppose this mindset is why anyone with lived experience of the services being assessed was excluded from involvement in the assessment process for the Cass review. The people least suited to assess a particular area of healthcare are, after all, the ones who have actually directly experienced it first-hand.

I suppose this mindset is why anyone with lived experience of the services being assessed was excluded from involvement in the assessment process for the Cass review.

Do you deny that Cass met and spoke with 1000 people with a range of experiences?

Cass had an email address to which all were free to write. Did you write and offer your personal lived experience as well as offer an audit of your professional experience?

@ButterflyHatched: "The people least suited to assess a particular area of healthcare are, after all, the ones who have actually directly experienced it first-hand."

I'm not sure that's always true. But in this case it certainly appears so.

We have to ask why? Why in this particular case are the people involved the least suited to assess?

One possibility. The well known 'explosion principle' of logic, otherwise 'ex falso quodlibet' (known since medieval times) points out that if you start with a falsehood as premise, anything and everything - true and false - follows logically from it.

So, for instance, begin with 'trans women are women' ... it follows logically from this that puberty blockers are safe. (Of course it also follows that you and I have two heads, that Boris Johnson is a decent person, that the moon is made of cheese, ... that puberty blockers are unsafe, ... that 2 + 2 = 4, ... )

After a while practising with obvious falsehoods, telling themselves they believe them and so on, do trans people end by habitually making deductions from these falsehoods - logical deductions with false conclusions?

Is this why trans people are the least reliable people to ask about trans healthcare, as @ButterflyHatched asserts? -- Their logical proclivities have been so severely mangled by attempts to believe contradictions?

(We might note this would not debar trans desisters, who would seem to have escaped from the false premises in question.)

Hmm?

A male adult doesn't have to pretend to be a man, because that's what he is. In fact he can't pretend to be a man, because you can't pretend to be something that you already are.

A male adult might pretend to be a woman, but he can never be one.

Aha! This principle must be why everything Michael Biggs writes on the subject of trans people across his tragically growing list of multiple publications is so transparently recognisable as agenda-laced misinformation dedicated to performing the academic equivalent of mechanical meat reclamation. I suppose you can't claim a plausible-seeming anti-trans healthcare reference set without a foundation of those bite-sized easily quotable gender-critical breadcrumb-coated nuggies!

So glad we could establish that this is still the overriding principle that informs your attitude toward the very real young people seeking treatment to help them address gender incongruence.

What do you mean by gender incongruence? Are you referring to stereotypes or people who are repelled by aspects of their own bodies? Or is it the gendered soul theory? Why does gender incongruence need to be 'addressed'? Nobody should be pushing stereotypes onto children.

All I was referring to was what @Snowypeaks said rather more clearly:

If you are conceived male, you are born male - a baby boy. If you survive to adulthood, you are a man. Having a male body and being a human is being a man. No pretence is required. Be as feminine as you like. Being a man doesn't rule out anything except the reproductive functions of a female human being.

The only 'principle' is fact. My 'attitude' is based on the fact that you are born male or female and this cannot be changed. Also that any behaviour exhibited by an adult male human is 'living as a man' and any behaviour exhibited by an adult female human is 'living as a woman'. I can't 'pretend' to be a woman because I am one. A man can't pretend to be a man because he is one. Whatever his behaviour, it is that of a man, even if he thinks he's behaving more like (a stereotype of) a woman.

Oh. We are now back to the immeasurable 'detransitioners' again.

Readers note: It has been recorded that the average time to detransition is about 7 years from treatment, if I remember correctly. The exponential increase in female children referred to the clinics was really starting around 2015, how many of those started to get seen? I believe it is accepted that it takes 'years' to get seen? Therefore from now is the time to start seeing an increase in detransitioners.

It is not that hard to understand that we have not started to see them yet.

It is dishonest to claim that they are not visible when there is so much abuse towards them when they are speaking publicly, and no records kept by the clinics to provide numbers, yet to then state that the expected 'increase' is a myth. When the fucking myth is the 'around 1%' rate that has been shown to be not even a good estimation with studies inadvertently uncovering rates of 6-9% from BEFORE the exponential increase in female children being referred to clinics across the world.

It is this dishonestly dismissing detransitioners that shows just how ideological some people are about this. And just how harmful that dismissal really is.

studies inadvertently uncovering rates of 6-9% from BEFORE the exponential increase in female children being referred

And that's a real worry, isn't it, as the criteria for transition treatment have shifted so much? If a clinic previously might have referred 100 girls a year, 95 of whom remained content with their transition, and more recently has referred 500 girls a year -- could all except 95 eventually regret it?

Yep.

The use of emotional manipulation there was outstanding, wasn't it.

The reality is, that a male who was gender non-conforming should have been allowed to continue to live as a gender non-conforming male defying stereotypes and proving that there is an endless way to be a man. Instead, this is positioned as being unacceptable because it would have made the male person 'miserable'. So, instead society has to believe that this male person is a woman and that this person's lived experience is 'female'. When it will only ever be the lived experience of a male who demands that the world treat them as if they were a female, and never an authentic experience of being a female person.

This false authenticity is then falsely presented as truth and the cycle continues.

Hmm. These increasingly hyperbolic posts laced with contempt for women, scientists, academics, parents and anyone who challenges what's happening to children stand in stark contrast to the sober yet chilling evidence from Michael Biggs. In the link below he exposes "research" about conversion therapy that attempts to influence government policy despite the research being, as usual, fundamentally flawed. He's spent a lot of time highlighting the lack of evidence and research at the Tavistock and elsewhere - it's no wonder trans activists want to silence him:

https://www.transgendertrend.com/conversion-therapy-gender-identity-survey-analysis/

At the end of this brief article is a link to some of his other research into this issue.

Yes, those studies/papers that I have read have been also before this push for affirming only treatment. Supposedly, they would have been patients who had been diagnosed in depth, with no dismissing underlying comorbities as the current model of treatment has been shown to be following.

This is the gender critical equivalent of fusion power always being 20 years away isn't it? It didn't materialise even after a four year exhaustive independent review, but it's coming. It's just round the corner. Aaaany day now...any day...all those people who validate your worldview will suddenly appear. Any day now.

"Allowed to continue" is a very dishonest way of phrasing "Actively prohibited from socially and medically transitioning."

Tbf some of the gender ideology world view is unravelling right now.

Are we still ignoring all the other organisations in the world, including the World Health Organisation, who have also declared that the evidence for use of puberty blockers is weak?

Seems so.

Now it is just throwing insults at professionals and academics who make the points from their own independent research. And never providing any detailed analysis by clinicians and academics with links to evidence that supports that analysis. Will we see more links from Reed appearing? It seems that some people really think that Reed's investigative skills are top notch. Mind you, the same person tried to tell us that their deep voice's 'power' had nothing to do with the sexist attitudes of the UK legal community and society in general. And that they meant 'power' as in decibels not the sexism male entitlement bias that that voice carries.

Why did you feel the need to try to convince everyone else that you were a woman, rather than just being yourself?