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July 20, 2024 - 8:00am
The claim is sensational and designed to terrify the parents of young people with gender dysphoria. “Better a trans son than a dead daughter,” activists tell them. The argument has been made ever more loudly since prescriptions of puberty blockers were restricted by the NHS following a High Court decision (Bell v. Tavistock) in December 2020. We’ve been told repeatedly that children will kill themselves if they can’t get puberty-blocking drugs.
I’m tempted to put the next sentence in capital letters: it isn’t true. A hard-hitting report, published yesterday, exposes the untruth of such claims, insisting that they “do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence”. Indeed, a review of suicides and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, carried out by Professor Louis Appleby of Manchester University, could hardly be more damning.
“The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock,” it says. It contains a stinging rebuke to people who have made such claims on social media, describing the discussion as “insensitive, distressing and dangerous”. The report also points out that it “goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide”.
In a highly unusual move, the report singles out the Good Law Project, which is challenging a decision by the outgoing Health Secretary, Victoria Atkins, to end the prescription of puberty blockers to children by private clinics. Its founder, Jolyon Maugham KC, launched a vicious personal attack on Atkins’s successor, Wes Streeting, after he confirmed that the new government will make the ban permanent. Maugham claimed that the ban “will kill trans children” and said his feelings about Streeting were “unprintable”.
In remarks that appeared to verge on deranged, Maugham made the hugely irresponsible claim that Streeting was locking his colleagues into “a future of bereaved parents tipping ashes outside No 10”. But he was not the only commentator to use such inflammatory language. “There is already evidence of a huge surge in the deaths of young people since their healthcare was trashed,” Guardian columnist Owen Jones stated on X last week.
Contrast those claims with the measured tone of Professor Appleby’s review. His conclusions are based on figures provided by NHS England for the period between 2018-19 and 2023-24, using an internal audit by the Tavistock of deaths among current and former patients of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).
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SubscribeHanging their heads in shame is unlikely. But more reports, like the one highlighted here, will slowly but surely grind down the poisoninus gender-ideology movement. Will the current Govt have the courage to stand up to the mob? They must take on reports like these and the Cass review in full – and decisively take action – before they get my vote of confidence.
I’ve got some rope, if it would make it more likely.
It is absolutely staggering that any board of ethics of any professional body could have sanctioned the chemical castration of healthy young bodies to supposedly address a psychological issue.
Of course these children are vulnerable, they routinely have complex presentations. Anyone working with autism knows how susceptible ASD clients are to tunnel vision – fixating on a ‘solution’ that explains everything.
Quite how being encouraged to adopt the fantasy that they can change sex (which children are eminently capable of believing) is touted as a long term solution to feelings of ‘not fitting in’ is the mystery.
These young people, who already struggle with social skills and friendships, are being led down a lonely and more isolated path. Their potential for forming intimate relationships in the future, when they have been sexually neutered, is massively compromised.
The long term outcome data for these medically manipulated patients has been of no interest to those prescribing the ‘treatment’. That, in itself, is shocking.
These numbers are so small that any conclusion could scarcely be drawn either way.
Those numbers were false anyway.
“This claim is said to be based on unpublished data provided by 2 members of staff at the Tavistock, described as whistleblowers. On Twitter/X the evidence is presented in screenshots of extracts from the records of Tavistock Board meetings and other documents. These variously refer to suicides, deaths from unspecified causes and “safety incidents”. A specific claim is that there was one suicide by a patient on the GIDS waiting list in the 3 years before the High Court judgment, and 16 deaths (rather than suicides) in the 3 years after the judgment. The whistleblowers are said to have alleged a cover-up by NHSE.”
The truth:
“In this period of 6 years the data show a total of 12 suicides: 6 in the under 18s, 6 in those 18 and above. In the 3 years leading up to 2020-21, there were 5 suicides, compared to 7 in the 3 years after. This is essentially no difference, taking account of expected fluctuations in small numbers, and would not reach statistical significance. In the under 18s specifically, there were 3 suicides before and 3 after 2020-21.”
The trans issue is not the first time Stonewall has played the suicide card. Lies can be powerful.
Can you expand? I don’t doubt you are right – activists will use (and reuse) any tactic which works. Even, apparently, if they know it to be a lie, or complete distortion of the truth.
Quoted from the actual report.
So we should not let the behaviour of activists wipe out our sympathy for these people. They are genuinely struggling. But what the report concludes is that puberty blockers do not solve the problem of suicide, the causes of suicide are complex and unclear, and non-judgemental support is the best option.
This latter will doubtless be framed as conversion therapy by activists if it fails to simply affirm the persons trans identity.
I’ve yet to come across any mainstream gender critical commentator who does not have sympathy for gender confused children. Not least because gender dysphoria overwhelmingly presents alongside other issues, such as autism, abuse, shame about having homosexual feelings etc.
The question is how we best help these children. The evidence base for the highly intrusive affirmative model involving social transitioning, hormone treatments and ultimately surgery is shockingly lacking and the scare tactic of summoning the spectre of suicides used by some trans rights activists is morally repugnant.
It’s the equivalent of treating anorexic teenagers by affirming that yes they are indeed repulsively fat and giving them Ozempic.
When the evidence base does not exist then first, do no harm. Watchful waiting, talking therapies, and unjudgemental support should always have been the default. It’s only because everyone has been so scared to challenge the self-appointed champions of “one of the most marginalised groups” that things ever got this far.
Children weren’t “gender confused” until this became the cool new fad introduced by malign forces determined to destroy civilizational norms.
That’s too much conspiracy theory for me – though I suspect there is an element of social contagion to this.
Some girls really do seem to struggle moving into adulthood. It’s an age when eating disorders and self harm start to manifest and anxiety increases.
Some girls, of course, turn to feminism as a way of rationalising their feelings, as if the issue lies with men or « stereotypical » ideas of female adulthood, instead of with themselves.
And more recently they seem to have picked up on trans as a way of avoiding female adulthood altogether. This isn’t wholly new, of course. For some time some girls have gone through a phase of presenting as masculine, avoiding feminine clothing and mannerisms like the plague. For some this is never resolved, but continues into adulthood.
Correct. Having grown up in the 80s and 90s, my classmates and friends never questioned their gender. We had girls who liked climbing trees, playing with cars, and preferred trousers; we also had a boy in the neighbourhood who liked his sister’s dolls, and the colour pink. He is married, and the father of three daughters now. We tolerated differences, and everything was fine.
I love the fact that Maugham’s law firm’s name is so obviously an oxymoron. It is clearly ‘bad’ in both theory and practice.
Can we please draw a more general conclusion from all this: many activists (and not just trans activists) are fanatics with fixed and rigid ideas and opinions who use bullying tactics to convince the public that it must give way to their demands and accept their point of view.
All of their claims need to be rigorously tested and challenged, and the actual status of their claims needs to be made clear to the public – true, false, no way of knowing, not even coherent etc. And this needs to be done authoritatively, not by people of the same fanatical spirit on the other side of the debate.
A useful law might be introduced in the light of Maugham KC’s hysterical assertions and the bogus nature of the statistical evidence in the Lucy Letby case that no lawyer be allowed to put forward any claim involving statistics without it first being examined and endorsed by two bona fide unbiased statistical experts. Lawyers as a whole are statistically ignoramuses.
Unfortunately most people use statistics like a drunk used a lamppost – more for support than illumination. Some do that knowing better but most, including nearly all politicians, don’t actually know any better.
If they knew the extent of their own ignorance it would be a start. Most operate on the basis of folk statistics – just like most of the population.
I would prefer if they learned not to weaponize suicide as that it the best way to encourage more suicides:
“Responsible reporting of suicide in the media is an important strand of suicide prevention, and a central feature of the national suicide prevention strategy in England. Guidance has been developed by Samaritans, originally for the news media but with wider applicability to any public discussion of suicide, and increasingly relevant to social media.
The risks include:
alarming stories about suicide causing distress to people who are themselves at riskidentification – when someone sees in themselves a connection with a person who has died by suicide; leading to:imitation and suicide clusters in people with similar characteristicsAs a result, the media – and users of social media – are asked to:
ensure that any claims about suicide are evidence-based and from a reliable sourceavoid alarming and dramatic languageavoid the impression that suicide is the expected or likely outcome in certain situationsavoid oversimplifying suicide by attributing it to a single cause which could be the basis of identification”
Idiots like Owen Jones may not know any better but a KC bloody well ought to, but the true monsters in all this don’t really care about how many children they harm and kill in pursuit of their twisted ideology.
Looking forward to Talia Perkins calling the report lies, in the face of actual facts.
The use of false suicide claims in such situations is beyond reason, or common decency.
I hope that TP has disappeared for good! What a nasty, rude, and very disturbed person!
I think it was Helen Joyce who observed that there are adults who will fight until death to deny the harm which the affirmative model does because the alternative is to face up to what they have done to their own children.
I believe Jolyon Maugham has a trans child. As does David Tennant.
Helen Joyce is brilliant.
Shouldn’t it be report ‘finds’ rather than ‘claims’?
Yes. Claim makes it read less factual, and more like a subjective statement rather than an objective finding based on factual analysis.
Will the press in the US ever admit the truth?
“Will increase suicide” is the last refuge of a scoundrel these days.
The boosters of puberty blocker prescribing have all bet the farm on this premise. It’s their meal ticket, their hobby horse and their drum to beat. If anyone blows the cold wind of reality through the room, hyperbole is quickly stirred up (“unprintable” feelings? Honestly!) and the tone quickly becomes bullying, manipulative and dismissive of dissent. How could it not? They’ve nailed their colours to the trans mast and lack any means of extricating themselves from the ensuing FUBAR.