Keira Bell launches bid to ban cross-sex hormones for under-18s

[NonCrimeHakeIncident]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4md23dgg2o

I think they plan to seek a JR. She’s an amazing woman.

There are numerous children buying hormones on the grey market. And adults too who don't seem very mature.

My dh has a sibling who is an adult and who i know for a fact is being encouraged online to buy hormones to transition. It was the only time I debated telling her mum as what if she ends up in a & e, just because you are above 21 doesn't mean you wouldn't buy dodgy hormones (people seem to get the dosages from reddit) and end up in ICU particularly since she is also chronically ill. Thankfully she doesn't seem.to be doing it. So dangerous esp for younger people

Well done Keira. The BBC report is very factual as well.

The use of a clear and easily understood phrase like "cross-sex hormones" shocked me. I thought the BBC usually obfuscated.

But in a letter sent by Sinclairs Law, Streeting has been told the law firm will seek a judicial review - a way of challenging the lawfulness of a decision by a public body - unless he follows suit with cross-sex hormones.

Can judicial reviews backfire? For example, could a judge conducting such a review find the puberty blocker ban unlawful as a result? Is there anyone here with greater legal knowledge who can offer insight?

Wow. Hugh Pym seems to have woken up.

There is a lot that the BBC needs to do to catch up on this awful medical scandal, but this is a step in the right direction from their main health correspondent.

Well done Keira Bell for keeping up the pressure 💪💪

Wow, Keira.

Brava.

Keira, you are an amazingly brave woman. Thank you!

Good! Hope there’s a good outcome, to protect everyone from potential harm buying dodgy hormones.

I have so much admiration for Keira - trying to protect children from the harms she was subject to. A very inspirational woman.

I can really relate to Kiera. When I was a child I desperately wanted to be a boy, and presented as such. I grew out of it around 11 years old and thank God there was no one talking about me transitioning, puberty blockers etc etc. If I had been born a couple of decades later I feel I may have had a very different expereince. Diagnosed with autism in later life helped make sense of it all.

This is from the BBC article.

Cross-sex hormone therapy is used to help people transition to a different gender from the one they were born into.

The same sentence appears in the linked article (by a different author) about the mother trying to stop her daughter being given testosterone.

But what does it mean? Nobody ever explains what they mean by "transition to a different gender". They can't be using gender to mean sex, because people can't change sex. If it's not being used as a synonym for sex, is it correct to say that people are "born into" a gender? If they are, surely it's only in the sense that a gender is imposed on them because of their sex, so since that comes from society, not the individual, then that can't be changed by superficially changing someone's physical characteristics, because it's not about the individual, it's about society.

This seems to be one of those statements which people repeat as though it makes sense, when it's obviously meaningless as soon as you start to analyse what it might mean. And this absurd idea about changing someone's gender, without being clear what is actually being changed, is what leads to children being given harmful medication.

I spotted that too. Do you think the BBC has a sort of rap sheet which lists approved definitions?

Ditto. I often think 'There but for a couple of decades in the advances in pharmaceuticals and the decline in medical ethics go I..'
I'd have bitten arms off to get access to puberty blockers, as I thought I'd rather kill myself than go through puberty and become an adult human female.

Spoiler alert: I got a huge dollop of pragmatism when my periods started, and just got on with it, and shortly afterwards realised I was a lesbian, and then discovered feminism. So I was very very lucky.

I have huge admiration for Keira, and great sympathy that she didn't get the care and support and advice she deserved. She is a wonderfully brave woman, who uses her own experience to great effect in the struggle to protect complicated little children (like we were, Stichintime) from ideologically-driven people taking advantage of them.

Keira is one of my heroes.

@OldCrone further to your analysis of that sentence. I believe TRAs tend to think of gender in an almost spiritual sense, as if they have a gendered soul. But that is also something that cannot be changed with drugs (I'm agreeing with you and just adding to it).

Actually, (carrying on from my last point) it would be more accurate to say that TRAs publicly espouse a belief in a gendered soul but plenty of them are Malaga airports or MRAs and almost certainly don't really believe in gendered souls.

Fully agree with both your points above @Supporterofwomensrights

The net effect is that Be Kind gets baked into journalism, and public institutions in general, in a way that pushes this belief in a gendered soul as if it's fact.

I used to believe I had one. It took me a long time to decide I didn't believe this any more. The turning point for me was this video that a MNer posted - I'm not trying to derail the thread but am putting it here in case anyone else finds it useful:

Despite my lack of belief, I feel as empathy for those who genuinely do believe in it (or have been taught to believe in it by schools and trusted adults) and are distressed by their body "mismatching" their "gendered soul". Obviously that empathy does not extend to the Málaga Airport gang who pretend to hold this belief. I see them as similar in many ways to the priests and vicars that we hear about every now and again in the press, who blatantly can't be true believers in god given what they have done.

Keira Bell was, but no longer is, a believer in gender identity. She's an incredibly strong, inspirational woman, doing everything she can to help stop this medical scandal.

"Keira Bell was, but no longer is, a believer in gender identity"
@BonfireLady You've highlighted something really important about Bell's story that I hadn't cottoned onto before.
She didn't go from feeling her GI was male, to feeling her GI was female.
She lost all belief in GI. I would say she woke up to what nonsense GI is but that's not a neutral take.
That will help me in conversations with others. Thanks.

That will help me in conversations with others.

I find talking about belief in gender identity (and lack of it) really helpful IRL conversations. I don't challenge the belief itself, rather the impact of it being upheld as a "truth". When you listen to detransitioners speaking, this shift from belief to lack of it seems to be the most common experience, rather than "identifying back" in alignment with being AFAB (if they are female) or AMAB (if they are male).

The Cass Report comes from a position of belief because it defines gender identity as a real thing. Large parts of sections 6, 7 and 8 read like tenets of a belief system instead of science. However, it's helpful that even from a position that says "we all have a gender identity", social transition and unevidenced medical interventions are seen as an unhelpful care pathway. And that the impact of accepting someone's gender identity as a start point is the likely overshadowing of other underlying issues that may be the root cause of distress.

From what I understand listening to people like Carole Hoover, the effects of testosterone on the brain are real - it's not a "gender identity" but it does help explain why young boys tend to be more aggressive than girls, why primary school age boys are on average faster at sport than girls and why the male sex drive is generally higher than that of a female... and why men as a sex class are a statistical threat to women: aggression + libido = loss of self control and hyperfocus on self-gratification. Obviously that's at the macro level, and a man with a lower libido or who is perfectly capable of managing his high libido without physically forcing himself on women (or on other men if he's gay) isn't less of a man. Gender identity belief seeks to map this more/less idea onto whether someone is male or female.

It's utterly mad that the NHS would support someone making physical changes to their body in line a belief that they hold, when there is no solid evidence base that it will help and plenty of evidence of harm. The evidence of harm relating to cross-sex hormone use is widely available: e.g. increased cardiac risk, increased risk of uterine cancer and 95% likelihood of incontinence for females using testosterone (even gender clinics advise hysterectomy after 5 years due to womb atrophy and increased cancer risks).

Public bodies like schools and hospitals need to follow the Nolan Principles by law. They shouldn't be following or promoting belief in the course of their work. We've hit a really weird blindspot on this at a societal level. I imagine most people would find it abhorrent if a hospital decided to hand out syringes of cyanide to its patients to help them on their journey in god's plan (the people in the Jonestown mass suicides, and the parents who injected their own children, did so because of their belief), yet here we are supporting and promoting life-impacting and likely life-limiting practices in relation to gender identity belief.

Does anyone else remember a poster on FWR making misrepresentations about Keira ‘retransitioning’? She must receive a lot of abuse.

I appreciate that the BBC article itself isn't the main theme of this thread but I keep coming back to how much of a barometer it is regarding the BBC's presentation of gender identity belief in the news.

I realised that I had referred to Hugh Pym incorrectly: he's not the main correspondent, he's the Health Editor. This is a key distinction because editors determine the lens through which correspondents and other journalists then report on the news. No, I really don't think he gets it down to the level of "we're medicalising based on belief-led 'science'", but I do think the cogs are whirring and stirring within the BBC in a way that suggests they are shitting it about whether they've fully understood what they've been championing and positioning as impartial.

Realising my mistake, I then googled "difference between Hugh Pym and Fergus Walsh's role at BBC". This was a great explanation (words in square brackets are mine):

It seems one concentrates on the actual medical side of things [Fergus] while the other [Hugh] looks at the politics, funding and organisation of our health service. There's bound to be some cross-over, but they're not doing the same job.

This is where it's from:

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2400424/bbc-cost-saving-why-is-there-a-medical-and-health-editor

So between them, Fergus Walsh should have been all over the medical risks associated with cross-sex hormones and other transition-related medical interventions and Hugh Pym should have been all over the wider landscape and delving into why the NHS has been funding this. It remains to be seen whether he is clever enough to see the parallels between what he has written here about Keira Bell and another good article that he wrote. Substitute "gender affirming care" for "infected blood" in the headline of this article and the it practically writes itself:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68831061.amp

Instead, we see naff all from him other than the occasional good piece like that Keira Bell article in this thread. He's setting editorial direction for Health news at the BBC. He really needs to wake up, take his fingers out of his ears and set aside this "both sides"/"far right" veil that seems to stunt his critical thinking. Fergus Walsh too - although there could potentially be other reasons for an inability to hear going on here.... Graham Linehan has an interesting theory on him:

https://x.com/Glinner/status/1810320419414761517?t=S6sdiU-AE0cCi6WVoYrgrQ&s=19

Anyway, all in all this is an improvement from the BBC's Health team and the public is at least now getting closer to understanding Keira's journey to date and why what she's now challenging is so important for the thousands of vulnerable children and young people who are caught up in this mess.

I have so much respect for young women like Kiera (and Chloe Cole et al) who have taken the awful things that were done to them and used their pain to fight to protect others from suffering the same fate.

I admire their empathy so much and their bravery in giving up their privacy to try to become potential role models for confused young people. Such determination and eloquence is rare and these intelligent young women were badly failed by the adults around them and the system that was supposed to help them.

Keira is so brave what an incredible young woman. My 19 year old has just got their hands on a prescription for testosterone and I think this might be the final straw needed for my nervous breakdown. I'm so so so so so so scared but my child feels that soon they are going to be "the best version of themselves." Gender GP should be burnt to the ground.

Especially given the abuse levelled at these women by gender ideologues and the attempts to silence them by powerful insititutions.

Let's not forget Kemi Badenoch's civil servants tried to block her from meeting Kiera and hearing what she had to say.

I'm so very sorry to read this, it's heart-breaking and all I can do is wish you strength, and hope against hope that your DD has second thoughts. Does she know about Keira Bell?
I can only imagine how powerless you feel, watching your child who is technically and legally an adult, but will always be your child, embarking on a dangerous journey.
for you and your well-being
and
for your daughter and her safety

💐💐💐💐

This would scare me too. This generation of children and young adults has been let down so badly by the schools and healthcare professionals who they should have been able to trust. I'm so sorry to read that you're having to watch your daughter go through this without being able to do anything.

The fuckers behind this medical scandal clearly don't care about the damage they're doing to the bodies of young adults and to the families that are trying to support them.

So sorry to hear that. X