If you get Sex Matters emails, there is a good summary by Helen J about the “debate”. I don’t think it’s up on the website yet. Highlights include:
“With that in mind, I’ll just pick out three things from the infuriating mess to comment on here.
The first was that Webberley wildly misrepresented the law, saying that the protected characteristic of gender reassignment gives people the legal right to live in their “reassigned” gender, meaning they can use single-sex spaces for the opposite sex”
And:
“The second is what this reveals about what happens in the consulting room of the gender-affirming clinician. We have to presume that Webberley – and other “gender-affirming” clinicians – has told patients that they have the right to use spaces and services for their “affirmed gender”, and that anyone who doesn’t use their “preferred pronouns” risks prosecution. Knowing this makes it easier to understand why it’s proving so difficult to get the For Women Scotland judgment to stick. That patients are likely to have been given these false assurances also raises questions about whether their consent to hormones and surgeries, which they presumably regard as part of their journey to “changing gender”, is truly informed.
The third is that she revealed possibly more than she intended about how the hard core of gender-affirming clinicians are responding to the ban on puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists; drugs that interrupt the hormonal signals that trigger puberty). She said other other drug protocols were replacing puberty blockers for use in young teenagers. Although she didn’t name them, an informed guess is that these clinicians are prescribing testosterone to girls around the onset of puberty, and a combination of spironolactone (a testosterone suppressor) and oestrogen to boys.
In other words, it seems that some clinicians are skipping the puberty-blocking pause with patients and proceeding straight to cross-sex hormones, which have irreversible effects, with patients who are likely to be no more than 12 or 13. This isn’t just shocking; it may be of interest to medical regulators.”