Hundreds of people are marching on Parliament to protest against moves that could change how puberty blockers are prescribed in gender affirming care.
Last year, health officials called for a new cautious approach after the government signalled an intent to consider regulating prescriptions to young people.
Regulatory measures could include restricting prescribing of puberty blockers in the context of gender affirming care but not its use in other contexts, the ministry said.
Queer Endurance in Defiance spokesperson Wyatt Dawson said in a release that the transgender community and its allies were worried any changes will mean trans children lose access to hormone therapy that stalls unwanted physical changes.
Puberty blockers should be available “on demand”, they said. . .
Would they march so that children with anorexia should be able to starve on demand?
Would they march so that children cutting themselves should be able to continue doing that on demand?
Only the deluded would. All reasonable people would want the children to be given the mental health treatment they needed instead.
Would they march seeking the right for children with xenomelia (the irrational desire to have healthy limbs amputated) to have a limb cut off on demand?
Again, only the deluded would. Reasonable people, accepting the science, would advocate for the mental health care the children need instead.
Why is the desire to amputate healthy limbs treated as a Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), a mental health condition, yet body dysphoria, the desire to stop puberty and amputate healthy breasts and genitals is not?
Gender affirming care is not care, it is child abuse. The first step in that abuse is puberty blockers and that’s followed by hormone treatment.
Fraser Myers interviews Helen Joyce about the grisly truth about kids transitioning:
Trans activists claim that access to ‘gender-affirming care’ is a basic human right. Even children, they say, must be free to medically ‘transition’. What this really means is providing children with powerful, sterilising drugs, followed by a lifetime of hormone treatment and irreversible surgery. And as we now know, following the landmark Cass Review into gender medicine, these children tend to be deeply vulnerable – often struggling with their sexuality, sometimes autistic or suffering from trauma – and most would grow out of their ‘gender distress’, if we allowed them to. Why have so many young, vulnerable children been lured – sometimes pushed – down this path? And why have so many supposed progressives become cheerleaders for such damaging and unnecessary medical interventions? . .
Fraser Myers: What consequences might children face if they medically transition?
Helen Joyce: There are some very real dangers for young children who are dissociating from their bodies. Going through puberty is distressing enough as it is, but it’s doubly distressing for children who dissociate from their bodies in this way. This might mean they’re not able to understand what their bodies are telling them or whether they’re attracted to certain people. If they receive hormone therapy as well, the consequences are catastrophic.
This is true for both sexes, but more so for girls. Quite simply, testosterone is a hell of a drug. It does a whole load of things to the body that are irreversible. I could grow a beard if I took testosterone. However, if a man took oestrogen, it wouldn’t make his beard stop growing. For something like hair follicles, once they have been switched on, that’s it. You can’t switch them off.
The same goes for your voice dropping. If I took testosterone, my voice would drop and I would never be able to get it higher again. These girls who are taking testosterone at 16 – which is the youngest you can get it on the NHS in England – will have facial hair within a year. They’ll have body hair, their voices will have broken. If they have the gene for male-pattern baldness, that will possibly have started, too. These are irreversible hormonal changes.
Testosterone is also terrible for female sex organs. It causes the vaginal lining and uterus to atrophy. Women who are on testosterone for more than a few years are eventually going to have to get their sex organs removed – which means they will be sterilised. However, oestrogen doesn’t really undo the things that testosterone does. Cross-sex hormones do far more damage to girls’ bodies than they do to boys.
There is a push to try to start male transition earlier or to block their puberty so they never go through testosterone-driven changes. But people are now realising that all of these interventions are very bad for a developing person. Taking what are euphemistically called ‘puberty blockers’ affects a child’s bones, brain and sexual organs irreversibly. It also affects future fertility and sex drive. If you stop all the natural processes that are supposed to mature a person during puberty, it will be disastrous. . .
You can watch the full video of the interview here.
Lionel Shriver asks is trans the new prestige diagnosis?
When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular lexicon about 10 years earlier, and public awareness of the perturbing derangement had been given a huge boost by the pop singer Karen Carpenter’s death in 1983. Yet not all these 18-year-old students were disturbingly underweight. It took me a minute to get it. They aspired to be anorexic. Anorexia was a prestige diagnosis.
While some of those students may have been merely flirting with the condition, they were canaries in a very dark coal mine. All too many of their peers were undertaking life-threatening calorie restriction in great earnest. Anorexia was already known to be the very deadliest of all psychiatric ailments. (Wanting to be anorexic, then, is like pining to contract necrosis.). . .
So surely this month I jumped at the chance to read Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia? Beginning in 1992, the columnist struggled for many years with the eating disorder, for which she was repeatedly hospitalised for months on end. Yet before diving into what proved a compelling and forthright memoir, I resisted. Honestly? The topic felt dated. Because as a prestige diagnosis, anorexia has been replaced. With trans.
Although Freeman spends half a chapter on the overlap between the two afflictions — both are “rooted in the belief that if you change your body, you will no longer hate yourself” — throughout her account I began to notice other intersections.
Both neuroses are clearly communicable. Ever since a preoccupation with thinness took off in the Sixties, eating disorders have soared, making the more recent insistence that anorexia is more of a heritable genetic proclivity than a cultural contagion dubious. From the Seventies onwards, an accelerating number of young women have got the idea to express their discontent through debilitating hunger from lavish media coverage, and one another. In kind, since 2010 the number of teenage girls referred to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service increased by 5,000% — making claims of a purely genetic explanation equally iffy. Both these afflictions are social confections. Although tales of people who starved themselves or passed for the opposite sex exist in the historical record, eating disorders and transgenderism on a mass scale are recent inventions. Collectively, we made these dire maladies up. . .
Both self-starvation and transgenderism guarantee elevation to a perceived social elite. . ..
Coming out as trans likewise greatly increases attention from schoolmates, teachers and a whole industry of therapists, endocrinologists and surgeons. In a single syllable, “trans” likewise seems to offer a readymade answer to who you are. Freeman tells us that “when an anorexic says, ‘I don’t want to be fat, I want to be thin,’ they are saying, ‘I want to be other than I am, and what I am is unhappy. I want to be someone else.” Clearly, transition to the opposite sex makes the same statement: I want to be someone else. But is becoming someone else really an option? . .
Some children are supported in their mistaken beliefs by teachers, often without parental knowledge, but some parents encourage their offspring:
The experience of having a child who refuses to eat is abundantly one of helplessness and despair. Ditto many trans parents — but not all.
For the paediatric gender clinic whistle-blower Jamie Reed testifies that in America’s liberal enclaves, having a trans kid has become a prestige diagnosis for many parents — one far preferable to the passé status of having a child who’s plain old gay. Reed identifies the root of the problem as another plain old: homophobia.
This is why many gay people now reject the alphabet soup of LGBQT+. They recognise that the trans movement is anti-gay.
Yet two distinctions between disordered eating and transgenderism are signal: diagnosis and treatment. In its latter stages, anorexia is visually conspicuous. While anorexics are often duplicitous, starving to death isn’t subtle; it’s not a secret you can keep for long. Freeman was hospitalised because her low weight was measurably dangerous. Yet according to current medical orthodoxy, diagnosis of transgenderism is purely subjective. The condition has no observable physical symptoms, no objective correlative. If I tell you I’m really a man, you have to take my word for it. The status is therefore unfalsifiable, the population of patients prospectively limitless.
As for treatment, anorexia is universally acknowledged as an illness. Doctors regard this potentially fatal form of dysmorphia as a psychiatric ailment that must be arrested and resolved. Not so transgenderism, which is often celebrated, if not beatified as a state of higher consciousness. “Gender-affirming care” doesn’t treat the illness but indulges the patient’s delusions to the hilt. Rather than coach a child to reconcile with reality, clinicians twist reality to reconcile it with the disorder. Anyone who dares describe the bizarre and biologically baseless conviction that one was “born in the wrong body” as a mental health issue is tarred as a transphobe. Were teenage anorexics treated anything like trans kids, they wouldn’t be encouraged to finish their dinner, but rather abjured, “You’re right: you’re fat! Your true self is even thinner! You will never rise to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty until you completely disappear!”
That would, rightly, be regarded as child abuse and no-one in authority would urge that.
Conversely, we’re implicitly dangling the promise that on the other side of transitioning to the opposite sex — or feigning transition, since inborn sex is written in our every cell — all a young person’s problems will be solved. Being trans is now a misguidedly easy-seeming shortcut to knowing who you are. But I’m betting that as an identity, being surgically mangled and hormonally discombobulated rarely goes the distance. Moreover, the physical price of buying this false promise of turning into a butterfly is stupendously high: sexual dysfunction, infertility, surgical complications and infections, and the side-effects of powerful medications for life.
What these conditions have most in common is being dreadful answers to the questions that inevitably torture young people: who am I, what makes me unique, what makes me loveable, what do I want to achieve, why does just being alive seem so hard, am I the only one who feels so dejected, what does it mean to become a man or a woman, and is there any way I can get out of growing up? The responsible adult’s reply to that last one must be a gentle but firm “no”.
Some responsible adults are saying no. They are recognising the steep rise in children confusing sex with gender stereotypes and seeking medical treatment instead of mental health help as a social contagion and a medical scandal:
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These people are the musicians playing as the Titanic sinks. The rest of the world has realised in horror what has been done to young people in the name of “gender” & “rainbow” activism. New Zealand’s trans activists are determined to continue to trap confused kids into a lifetime of serious medical issues and infertility, and for what? Almost all of them would grow out of it and research shows transition doesn’t improve mental health in the long run. . .
New Zealand is lagging behind other countries which have accepted the scientific evidence that sex is binary and immutable and that giving puberty blockers to children who are confused about this is wrong.
The lag is doing irreversible harm to children and it is more than time to follow the example of other countries, including the UK which has imposed an indefinite ban on the use of puberty blockers for anyone under 18 with gender dysphoria.
Existing emergency measures banning the sale and supply of puberty-suppressing hormones will be made indefinite, following official advice from medical experts.
The Commission on Human Medicines (CHM) has provided independent expert advice that there is currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children. It recommends indefinite restrictions while work is done to ensure the safety of children and young people. . .
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said:
Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led. The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.
Dr Cass’ review also raised safety concerns around the lack of evidence for these medical treatments . We need to act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice.
We are working with NHS England to open new gender identity services, so people can access holistic health and wellbeing support they need. We are setting up a clinical trial into the use of puberty blockers next year, to establish a clear evidence base for the use of this medicine. . .
Canadian research echos the findings of the Cass Review.
Failure to follow the evidence is pandering to the delusion that feelings can trump facts and that sex is neither binary nor immutable.
It is putting trans activism ahead of the science, denying children the mental health support they need and endangering both their physical and mental health.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
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