It’s now blindingly clear why GIDS became so overtaken by ideology; Polly Carmichael is a bloke.

I have “lived experience” of gender dysphoria. Clinical psychologists start from the premise that affirmative care entails an accepting stance that says gender diversity isn’t a disorder but has existed across cultures through history. They aim to validate the testimonials coming from gender distressed children, like I once was.
However, what follows is at odds with this rhetoric. If they truly accepted the gender dysphoric child, then the logical response would be to de-bunk gender (as queers and feminists did in the pre-Trans era). Gender should not be a heteronormative straight jacket into which we all must fit. Unlike biological sex – which is real – gender is just a set of social conventions. Instead of embracing social non-conformity (the actual cause of the child’s distress), affirmative care clinicians pathologise the child because he/she does not conform. In the past, the ‘solution’ was not to change non-conformists, it was to tackle the social conventions that reinforced rigid stereotypes. Affirmative care is as regressive as lightening a black person’s skin to make them ‘less distressed’ in a racist society.

An excellent and timely piece. I am convinced that one of the main antidotes to excess in this and other fields suffering from radical progressive cultism is the combination of fact based investigative journalism and calm reasoned debate. The public, when well informed, tends to react strongly against lunacy. Congratulations to Kathleen and UnHerd.

I suggest the next topic for fact based investigation should be corporate DEI training. Even in its own terms, I understand research reveals it is utterly counterproductive and that, if anything, it actually increases unconscious bias and systemic racism.

Meanwhile, the sensible next step on puberty blockers for teenagers is surely to make their prescription without a prior general assessment of autism, social contagion in the peer group, etc etc illegal – or at least medically unacceptable. A few doctors struck off for irresponsible prescription would change behaviour rapidly. Prior to the assessment, instead of teenagers being automatically “affirmed” 100% in their new gender choice they should be told that it is one amongst several possible explanations for their feelings i.e. it should neither be denied nor unambiguously endorsed.

Lastly, hidden away in this excellent essay was the truly radical idea that adults are not fully psychological mature until they are twenty five. Although I believe this is relatively uncontroversial amongst psychologists, unleashing this thought in public debate may cause mayhem. After Kathleen has slain the trans activist dragon, should we expect her next campaign to be raising the voting age to twenty five? with Charles Stanhope – an obvious ally – pointing out in support that this was Roman approach? The mind boggles.

“ For instance, the website of Indigo, the pilot service in Manchester, says: “We know that trans and non-binary people are the experts of their own experience… Our services are trans and non-binary-led, with trans and non-binary people guiding and feeding into them at all levels.”

A literal admission that rather than clinicians leading it is the lunatics who have taken over the asylum.

Transgenderism rests on the notion that there is a “self” somewhere inside you, separate from the body that hosts it, which is capable of determining whether you are ‘really’ in the ‘right’ body. This is philosophical and psychological nonsense, but it is the basis of the equally ridiculous idea that gender dysphoria is a normal, healthy expression of human identity. It’s not. It’s a disorder, obviously, perhaps in the area of OCD (the doubting disease as it was called in the 19th century), dissociation and even aspects of psychosis – losing touch with reality. But the false Californian belief system of endless self reinvention in the search for hyperindividualistic libertarian-flavoured “authenticity” and imaginary “liberation” currently completely obscures the mundane truth that being human is difficult.

A brilliant article. Sorry to say that the findings of it are not in the least bit surprising, this is exactly what I expected when the closure of GIDS was announced. My first thought was it’ll just be the same people doing the same things in several places instead of one, and here it is!

1. No public funding for activists – none of them do research, they just broadcast opinions
2. Any employee of the service makes a patient decision supported by anything other than evidence based medicine is struck off

An excellent article. I am reminded of the 1970s album and song ‘Crime of the Century’ by Supertramp. The lyrics are, IMO, chillingly accurate to what we see unfolding before our eyes. It appears to me that gender dysphoria, which I understand to be a mental health issue, is the perfect feeding ground for gender identity ideology, which could be termed the crime of the 21st century.
But perhaps it rather works the other way round: gender identity ideology creates, or at the very least, supports the development and existence of gender dysphoria. It is not the affected children and their parents that benefit from this development but big pharma. After all, medical transition guarantees a life-long income stream for pharmaceutical companies.
Kathleen Stock’s book ‘Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism’ arrived yesterday. I’m looking forward to reading it.
 

Trans is paedophilia remarketed.

Women should sue for free breast enhancement surgery if men can get this and if other women can get free breast elimination surgery. Surely breast size choice is part of gender expression.
The issue of funding for ‘health’ treatment is key: why fund health treatment for something that is not a health problem? Having and eating cake…

Journalism at its best. Brava to Dr Stock and Unherd for such a thorough investigation into this dangerous collision between science and ideology.

This informative article points to only one conclusion: Transhumanism is here to stay and the gendered mind requires concerted research, not just psychoanalytically but in today´s production of hormonal imbalances in young people that results in this ´transgendered mind´ which may also have a strong relationship with the preponderance of autism as a distinctly modern condition.

There is a fundamental psychological question in this. In the complexity of the psyche, there is an ‘internal other’, which is ‘me’ and ‘not me’. Haunted by such disturbing sensations, feelings, and dream images, we try to rationalize and concretise them. So, we often turn to a contra-sexual fantasy figure. We identify with this psychic image, and erroneously seek to embody it (often literally). This fantasy of the ‘Other’ can take other forms, of course. But gender ideology pushes us towards the ‘opposite’ gender figure. Though such images come from a deeper level in the psyche, we personalise and literalize them. It is like having a generalised, abstract anxiety. We try and concretise it by ‘inventing’, say, a ‘dog phobia’. Then we can feel at least we understand why we are anxious and keep away from dogs. It keeps the anxiety contained. Thus, do we deal with the ‘internal other’, inherent in the very nature and complexity of the psyche. A naivety and simplistic psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry are then complicit in this literalising, concretising process.

If conversion therapy is banned, it will be increasingly hard to implement any kind of approach which is not gender affirming. At the very least, any non gender affirming care will involve suspending belief in the persons claimed identity while the issue is explored.

Will it really be possible to explore other causes? And if the professional convinces the patient that they are not really a boy in a girls body but that their feelings have some other cause, isn’t that an example of conversion?

With its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, gender self-identification is where Thatcherism has inevitably ended up. It was an unknown concept in 2010, and has arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Margaret Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and d**k Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.

Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. She created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour. Leo Abse, who had had the measure of the milk-snatcher, also had the measure of Tony Blair’s androgyny.