NHS to test all 'transgender' children for autism / same-sex attraction

[Pluvia]

This is the archive link to the Telegraph article so that everyone can read it:

http://archive.today/CnELA

As a result of the Cass Review, all children presenting as transgender will be assessed for autism and same-sex attraction. Excellent news all round. Looks like they're going to stop sterilising autistic children and training away the gay.

So proud to be a terf of terf island. We changed this. We saved some kids, at least, a lifetime of medication and isolation.

And they won't be "tested " for same sex attraction, that's not even possible, it would be considered as part of the wider assessment

This is excellent news but the Cass report came out months ago - why has it taken so long for the NHS to act upon Dr Cass’s findings?

The Cass report still has the fatal flaw of starting from the basis that ‘Trans’ is a real condition.

So more a wider consideration of the drivers of a child’s distress, rather than assuming the child has a wide enough understanding of the world to correctly identify the source of their discomfort.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, ND, sexual orientation considered as influences, rather than the affirming approach that ignored all those factors in the interests of as swift and effective a transition as possible to improve their chances of passing.

Sound positive. Sensible. And like something that should already have been happening.

I would think the conversion therapy bill however threatens a spoke in the wheel here (it is certainly meant to by activists.)

If that suggested bill is not kicked back into the long grass again as the many serious complexities become apparent, it's going to have to be so very detailed and specific that it's hard to know really what it will achieve. The FWS judgment has proven that it will need to be at a Peter and Jane level of readability and semantic clarity, as apparently very few people are capable of retaining content meaning beyond sentence level or being able to understand a sentence in context. Or apply basic common sense. Or actually read the thing as opposed to pick up on outsourced thinking from a source that hadn't properly read or understood it either.

My son has autism and when he was about 9 he was upset as he thought he was transgender. After a conversation with him he said he had learnt at school about transgender and wearing nail varnish. He had seen on YouTube that some designs looked cool therefore he must be transgender. I explained to him that you can like nail art and not be transgender. He was then happier as he then knew he didn’t have to be transgender to wear nail art. He is a teenager now and no signs of being transgender at all. For me this highlighted how a persons mind with autism can just try to connect the dots when told something as fact. So I totally agree with them exploring this first.

The vast majority of people who are trans are also autistic. They don't fit in and the reason must be that they are in the wrong body. If they identify as the opposite sex then all that will go away. It never does.

For those who've not been involved in the problematic issues surrounding gender identity treatment for children, this 2021 interview might be useful:
www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/02/tavistock-trust-whistleblower-david-bell-transgender-children-gids

'Trans' is not a condition, but a contemporary framing device for people/children unable to deal with social or familal expectations around their sex.

I recall a local newspaper article about a boy- early teens - the son of a really tough, working class father who was a 'Mixed Martial Arts' fighter. Most likley gay, it was obvious he couldn't cope with the expectations of boys in his neighbourhood ( a big, working class housing estate on the edge of the city)....and identifying as a girl was his solution.

Yes, this is good news. And presumably will take the place of the erstwhile gender clinic interview where a child says i'm trans and gets given a prescription, with no, or very few, questions asked.

Stephanie Davis Arai of Transgender Trend said she has yet to encounter a child who thinks they are trans, who isn't either autistic, gay, or has had past sexual trauma.

We know there is no such thing as being born in the wrong body. Therefore trans is being used as a cure all solution to a myriad of other problems. Cynically by transactivists, targeting children.

What the screening will do is work backwards to find out exactly why a child thinks they might be trans. In which case they can address the actual problems, not pander to a child sterilising, dangerous ideology with no basis whatsoever in reality.

They really need to engage in sessions of family therapy too.......I suspect a large proprtion of very young children who come out with the idea they are the opposite sex, will be down to parental expectation and desire.

There was an excellent, very revealing documentary onCchannel 4 ( I think!). A few years ago about a young boy in France ( 'La Petite Fille') who was 'identifying as a girl' and was being encouraged in this by his mother ( father not so keen). The mother was very open, and yet startlingly unaware at the same time, about how she had longed for a girl before he was born, and how deeply disappointed she was when the baby was a boy.

'Being a girl' involved dressing up in princess/fairy outfits and having long hair

It looks important to respond to the upcoming public consultation.

That was a good overview but I hope for more specifics in the consultation.

No, most children who think they are trans who aren’t autistic aren’t ’really trans’ either.

Getting to the bottom of why these children think there is something wrong with their body can only be a good thing, rather than ploughing ahead, agreeing that their body is wrong and taking actions that they may regret later.

Exactly.

There's no such thing as trans. At it's purest, it's gender dysphoria. Which is a symptom.

This will find out what it's a symptom of.

And hopefully, it will completely explode the myth of the trans child.

Because they’ll already have been referred to the multi disciplinary team who can assess and diagnose (ie the psychologists at the gender identity service). So it won’t be a case of that service suspects autism and then refers on, it will be a case of being screened in house and assessed if needed. I can’t see that it would impact waiting lists for those on the singular pathway for ASD/ADHD assessment because they’re different services.

So you are saying children who do not declare they are trans, but who may well have other comorbid mental health conditions, will have to wait years and years for assessment. Whereas those who state the magic word ‘trans’ get assessed straight away?

A symptom of being taught by gender ideologists that people must conform to sex stereotypes and if they don’t they must be trans.

Re: sexuality, I don't think they would be asking young children 'are you gay?'

I think it's more likely that they would be asking in an age appropriate way what they thought future family and relationships might look like, and whether they thought that depended on transition.

I'm very much hoping that diagnosis will be less 'Yes, you like trains so you are a boy' and more 'Do you think girls can't like trains?'

My guess is that they’ll just screen?

I'm glad the link is acknowledged when people working with children have long spotted it.

But..... I guess the problem is still the homophobia and sexism in society. I know of several teenage girls who realised they were gay and came out as such, only for that identity to morph into pan/ non binary/ trans. What is it about the identity of "lesbian" which makes it so unappealing?

And what about the bias of some healthcare workers themselves? Most autism charities leapt aboard the trans trend seemingly unconcerned by the eugenic undertones of exposing so many autistic young people to potential sterilisation?

Yes that was my first thought too.

Thank you for this measured and sane response to my OP, @ArabellaScott I can't believe the people whose minds jumped instantly to 'how would you test for same-sex attraction?'

As you say, it's the holistic approach recommended by Cass that will be adopted. Children's lives and backgrounds are explored so that there's a clear picture of what's going on for that child. I hope the specialists will also talk to the parents, because as we know from the example of Susie Green and the testimony of Dr Az Hakeem, parents influence can be a major issue. The data will be interesting and I hope there'll be a lot of useful research to come out of it.

I would suggest that there is an increasingly strong and clear LGB voice developing within the Labour Party, at least. I'm involved with Labour LGB, which has separated from the LGBT lobby groups and is getting some traction. Once the dust of the SC ruling has settled and the NHS has this new protocol in place, we'll be in a great position to argue that LGB and TQ+ are different, and that the kind of NHS treatment proposed by Cass and accepted by the NHS does not constitute conversion therapy.

Given that’s it’s already well established that children who identify as trans are disproportionately more likely to be autistic, I’m not sure what this new initiative hopes to achieve. If the suggestion is that if they are autistic, then they shouldn’t be acknowledged as trans in the way a non-autistic child might be, then you can expect howls of protest on disability discrimination grounds.