Hillary Cass at Scottish parliamet - live

[ArabellaScott]

This started at 9am.

https://www.scottishparliament.tv/meeting/health-social-care-and-sport-committee-may-7-2024

There is currently an AMA on the Feminist Chat board that is a pretty good example using some of the 'reasonable' arguments of 'true trans' position.

I can’t find it now, but I think the number needed to treat was close to 50. So 49 people would have a negative effect before the one person had a positive outcome

Wings over Scotland reckons Cass's words had a big impact:

The Scottish Government's lethally reckless and misguided ban on "conversion practices" was dealt a fatal blow today.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/a-watery-grave/

What kind of person do you have to be to think that it's ok to harm 49 others to improve your own life?

That's grim.

There is no way that any of the bullshit assertions stand up to measured investigation. And I think once it dawns on people that they have been cheerleaders for the sterilisation of children based only on the mindless chants of the glitter and rainbows cult, they will surely look at the whole exercise and ask <why>?

I can't help wondering whether they're seeing an opportunity to adopt a more balanced position now that they're not dancing to the Green position.

I’m disappointed if she actually said that hormones are the right treatment for some. I would have thought the jury was still out on that as well. Given there have been no recent attempts to explore more modern/recent mental health interventions and the long term evidence base is also poor for this group, I’d much prefer if she had been circumspect in this too.

As for “trans” representation, WPATH, PBs and affirmation are the perfect example of why it is essential that patients are not involved in deciding the medical direction here, beyond the same level of patient input as there might be for diabetes treatment or whatever.

As I said, my 'minimum of 7' was being exceedingly generous on several points. Closer to 50ish certainly seems well within the bounds of the possible.

Found it here https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/11/58371/

“In this study, the NNT appears to be a staggering 49, meaning the beneficial effect of surgery is so small that a clinic may have to perform 49 gender-affirming surgeries before they could expect to prevent one additional person from seeking subsequent mental health assistance”

Discussion is about this study https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19010080.

This article doesn’t go into the number needed to harm which is the number of individuals who must be treated so that one of them presents an adverse reaction accountable to the treatment. For gender medicine, which is usually done on physically healthy bodies, must be astronomical when you look at all of the side effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_needed_to_harm

I'm sorry, but 'balance' is not a word that comes to mind when talking about these people. 'Power' and 'control', yes.

I think it's possible that PBs might be the right intervention for some.
My biggest problem with the positive affirmation model for trans identifying kids is that it's a one size fits all model. It deliberatly throws away individiual circumstances in favour of a one size fits all ( OSFA ) model of care.
I strongly reject the OSFA approach because of the many possible negative life long consequences that are not acknowledged or discussed for kids with the most incredibly complex and challenging lives.
To say that PBs could never give someone a better quality of life, even after all the negatives are taken into consideration is also a OSFA approach, and for that reason I have to reject it. For something as complex as the lives of the kids self reporting that they are trans there cannot possibly be a single OSFA solution. It has to come down to the indivdual's circumstances.
I think the number of cases where PBs were the best option would be utterly miniscule compared to what TRAs demand, but it has to remain a possibility specifically to avoid the OSFA trap.

Thanks for the thread @ArabellaScott .

There really is no evidence that keeping a human in a child like state, not allowing them to develop and giving them drugs that in any other instance would be stopped after a short dose due to their harmful effects, is going to be beneficial to them.

None at all!

I can't get over how people have been hoodwinked into thinking some kids deserve this.

It really does show how deep indoctrination can go.

Look at the state of Gillian McKay's amendment to the Tory proposal to implement the cass review findings. 🙈🙈🙈

To say that PBs could never give someone a better quality of life, even after all the negatives are taken into consideration is also a OSFA approach, and for that reason I have to reject it.

Sometimes a OSFA answer is correct, though. Banning Victorian arsenic face creams was a OSFA solution, but that didn’t automatically make it wrong. They worked as a way to make skin paler, but the cost to health was too high - so they were banned even for people who really wanted to be pale.

Even assuming there were some way to work out who is 'actually trans' at a stage where PBs are relevant (which is not.currently possible), if research shows that the best possible benefit is small and the unavoidable harms are large then saying they are not suitable for anyone will be the right answer.

FFS could they try to be a wee bit less mortifying 🤡🤡🤡

What a tosser that woman Gillian McKay is. Still happy to harm children.

My point was that Dr Cass apparently said that hormones are the right treatment for some.

I have no objection to anyone saying “might be” about any of these treatments, but conceding that transition is the right treatment for some remains unproven.

I suspect history will conclude that, like lobotomy, the entire concept was flawed and that, even though some people survived it (or even thrived despite it) it wasn’t ever a reasonable or justified treatment.

Well staying on my not behaving like the other side high horse.
We can never know if a treatment is any good without trying it out and observing the results. Someone has to be first by definition.
I'm hugely against the positive affirmation model of care because it's far more political/religious dogma than medical best practice.
However I am all for science based research. Observation, results, follow ups for the lifetime of the patient. Collating all results for all patients, accumulating as much raw data as possible.
A new cancer drug has to be tried out on people, the covid vaccines didn't have enough time for the usual years long medical trials, so there was an element of leap of faith in us all taking that.
What I'm utterly against is a OSFA approach based on virtue singallers feeling good about themselves and ignoring all medical best practice.
What I'm for is proper medical study with no element of politics or religion, just pure evidence based research. I hope we as a society go down that path now given the Cass report, and I hope other countries follow suit.
In "voting" for science and evidence I have to acknowledge that the medical science might not arrive at the exact result I was expecting. I think worst case it will be pretty close to what I'm expecting and very far from the current affirmation model dogma, but I do have to keep an open mind that there may be some individual cases ( and I believe that these would be very rare ) where PBs, even after the negative effects are taken into consideration, allow for the best quality of life outcome.
As to does the evidence to support this exist right now? No I don't believe it does, but it is possible that if proper medical science is done, that it might exist in the future, and then again it might not. The point being that if your science knows the result before you do the science then it's not science. I think to do the medical studies properly on this topic will take at least a generation. Participants undergoing ANY treatment should be follow up tracked for the rest of their lives to see how it affects them for the entirety of their life.

So, unless I am mistaken, neither Harvie, Slater or person person could be arsed to show up to rip Cass to shreds? Nothing to do with having a bona fide world class expert who would make you look utterly stupid if you tried it then? Fucking cunts, the lot of them.

We can never know if a treatment is any good without trying it out and observing the results.

Nonsense. We can be very certain many treatments are going to be bad without trying them out. We are not stuck in the Stone Age, we know an awful lot about biology, chemistry, etc. New drugs and treatments are not discovered by simply giving them to people and asking the ones who don’t die how they feel. You don’t get anywhere near clinical trials without masses of lab and animal work first. And the result of most of that lab work would make it totally unethical to provide the treatment to humans. That is why it costs on average over a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, and why drug companies are so keen to push their drugs before the patent runs out.

Alex Massie’s take on today’s committee session:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/21d78408-5443-49ca-84c6-d02f78d2719b?shareToken=c7dd182540fcf6d28c4e4a2963fdce8d

Oufff at the final sentence! Thank you for the link, Utopia.

"By the end of the hour allotted for Cass’s testimony, the past had been thoroughly rewritten. None of the committee’s MSPs had ever embraced a medical pathway of unproven utility based on gerrymandered evidence at the behest of activist lobbyists for whom any and all dissenting views were axiomatically proof of bigotry and “transphobia”. They were always on the right side of history."

🔥 🔥🔥

We do know these drugs have high side effects, which is why the usage is restricted when used for what it is licenced for.

Using them to put a child in stasis is not one of them. Using them for years is against all usage guidelines.

We know that the reasoning is because adult men wanted boys who might grow up to want to be women, to not develop properly, in order to pass more easily. The very reason was to stop development.

We know that the two trial cases were girls though, and they did this because their parents didn't want butch lesbian daughters.
None of the original reasoning makes sense when they trialled it on girls not boys.

We know that the Dutch 'trials' were being done AFTER WPATH guidelines were stating it was an OK medical pathway. The evidence as to how they made this decision is difficult to find as they have wiped the old SOC documents which changed their 'don't do it to kids' guidance to 'do it to kids' guidance.

They didn't lose their long term studies, they didn't ever plan to DO long term studies.

When the GIDS wanted to trial it, they had to go to at least two ethics boards, and they were finally given permission to trial it aged 12 and above, and they then ignored the age restriction AND DELIBERATELY only asked for approval to get patient feedback until they got to 16.

This has specifically always been designed to avoid collecting evidence because from the beginning, they knew about the harms. They have been doing this for at least a generation already.

This whole thing is an experiment they did on kids and the follow up has been specifically designed out. This is not a 'my dog ate my follow up studies' situation.