“we don’t know enough” about the psychiatric impact of gender reassignment surgeries.

[IwantToRetire]

The whole idea of doing this to children to … presumably get them to think more about what they’re experiencing has been a track towards … persuading them and has not been a good idea,” he said.
“I’ve, after all, seen a lot of young people … especially young girls, being persuaded that there are some aspects of themselves, in their body, that needs correction,” he said. “It’s really the foundation of anorexia nervosa and things of that sort.”

Children need to be “encouraged to just grow up and let their body take it,” McHugh said. “It turns out that 85% to 90% of them drop off of this. So if you don’t treat them with so-called gender affirming treatments, hormones, or surgery, they gradually give it up.”

Puberty is “a very vulnerable time … all kinds of things are changing in your body and in your mind,” McHugh said. “Once you get through puberty, a new kind of person comes to think about what life is going to be like, what they would commit themselves to.”

https://ewtn.co.uk/article-psychiatrist-paul-mchugh-speaks-about-decades-long-career-opposition-to-sex-reassignment-surgeries/

Course we don’t.

We seem to have completely forgotten everything we know about human/ child development and the brain in the first 2-3 years of life and again at puberty.

it also struck me the other day that the old style nursery nurse courses covered all this, as well as teaching them observation skills. Early childhood theories such as Piaget et al.

Those courses stopped over a couple of decades ago and most who were trained in them are reaching retirement age.

later Teaching assistant courses were shorter and more accessible, cheaper. Skipped the theory. They needed bodies in the classroom.

Why does this matter? This general knowledge that more people involved with young children on the chalk face, across the population has been lost.

I believe that Read Some Piaget on Twitter is writing what I believe is a very over due book.

When you understand the reasoning behind Vygotsky et al, it’s really quite scary to consider what’s been going on in classrooms all over the western world.

The school to clinic pipeline.

Also relevant to consider the pathologising of so much in childhood and parenting, the focus on empathising (without tracking where this came from and in what context) and the psychologists beginning to voice concerns about training children to be overly preoccupied with and concerned by their inner state and how this has generated anxiety among other things.

💯

The whole emphasis on mental health is in itself a bit deluded. Why don't we start from the physical outcomes and then ask "well what kind of mental heath outcome would justify this much damage to a previously healthy young body?"

I think there should be a distinction made between mental health and emotional health.

It seems to me [a total non-expert] that the emotional experiences of young people - which can be difficult and painful - are too often pathologized as 'mental health issues'.

Obviously, sometimes the emotions are overwhelming and even disabling and that calls for serious intervention and support, but 'feeling anxious about exams' or 'feeling worried about wars' are perfectly reasonable, valid and in the vast majority of cases manageable emotional reactions to challenging stuff, not indications of mental health problems.

'Feeling confused about the implications of my sex/gender' is neither unusual nor, in this sexist world, unreasonable, and I'd put that in the category of emotional health rather than mental health. And there's a lot of evidence that it will right itself with the passage of time anyway.

Mental health services for young people are being overwhelmed, and I fear that young people who really need help with mental health problems are not getting the help they need because of so many demands on resources from young people who need support for emotional issues which shouldn't need high-level intervention, and certainly shouldn't be on a medication/surgery pathway.

But I repeat, I am a complete non-expert in this area, this is just my opinion.

From what I’ve read here and there a number of people in the field agree with you @MarieDeGournay

I agree about the distinction but I take a stronger view. Physical health comes first. Maybe many people are too pearl-clutchy to talk openly about real physical outcomes like urinary incontenence and strokes. One young man has said in public that the result of surgery is that it takes him three hours to have a pee and he leaks urine. And that's on top of repeated surgeries to avoid total urinary blockages. Oops!

Thinking about psychiatric outcomes is like re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

THIS!!!

We have allowed adults with zero experience / qualifications / knowledge of childhood to self identify as "experts' and dabble in education, the school curriculum and pastoral care. They've been allowed to impose their deeply unhealthy, misogynistic & anti safeguarding beliefs & fetishes on children. They've self identified as experts and schools have accepted at face value their disordered demands under the mantra of inclusion

There are many concrete examples. GIRES "training" for adults working with children that promoted fundamental breaches of safeguarding - keeping secrets, promising confidentiality & affirmation to little primary children etc. The CPS providing "policy" for schools that displayed an ignorance of schools, peer relationships & safeguarding. These initiatives have disappeared following challenge but Gendered Intelligence still offer "mentoring" from trans adults for gender confused children in schools and run "youth groups" for 8 - 25 year olds! Some schools still impose mixed sex changing and toilets on children despite the law and everything we know about adolescents.

Teaching (& medicine, social care, psychology etc) all abandoned their professional knowledge and expertise in the face of trans extremist demands with children being the casualties.

I think there should be a distinction made between mental health and emotional health.

Very shrewd.

If the question is asked, specifically to someone's mental health and serious diagnosed mental illness, should this be resolved by a lobotomy? The answer these days would be a horrified no.

A century back, you'd have been lectured in depth by top medical professionals telling you about the lifetime calm, the peace, the safety, the relief of terrible symptoms, the much greater freedom and happiness of patient and carers, a much less restrictive future...

And we'd still these days say absolutely not, it's unthinkable.

Something entirely equivalent to this is being pushed as an answer to emotional health. A permanent (possible, attempted) solution to what may very well be a temporary problem, with no guarantee that the patient will find it to be a solution or not live to suffer more from regret.

Part of the reason I posted this was it was really depressing to see how long ago Paul McHugh was writing about this and challenging what we now call the trans narrative.

And how the interventions he made were then ignored or over turned.

And wondered whether it was that his views were dismissed as just being those of a (reactionary) Christian, or that generally older peoples viewson trans identity etc., have basically been dismessed as being out of date and out of touch.

ie happy to ignore the facts his research found, so as to promote the current agenda that once you trans everything will be okay.

Training courses are likely now some pre recorded online recording that has been developed by some activist organisation. No opportunity to ask questions or discuss the inappropriate content.

Exactly, let them grow up and see who they really are. If at 25 they still feel that way then if they want to pursue cosmetic surgery and hormones that is their choice. But either way, no male should be told they can come into female single sex space.

Spot on. This is so true of mental health generally.

I think this points to how poor quality experts and academe can be these days, tbh. I’m sure all of the people pushing these narratives and ideas were all on paper very well trained with Masters and PhDs and probably some handful of clinical qualifications- and it’s the lack of challenge to them that has in a large part gotten us to where we are.

See also peanut allergies - there was at best poor and limited evidence to suggest early exposure to peanuts increased the risk of allergic reaction, but that idea got traction under “better to be safe/common sense” and that idea turns out to have caused no end of harm.