As many regular readers will know, I have a pretty liberal attitude to adults who wish to use drugs and surgery to give themselves the appearance of the opposite sex. If an adult wants to make the life changing and permanent decision to go down this path and the individual is sane and understands what they are getting into, then that to me comes into the area of personal autonomy. In such cases gender reassignment is only affecting the individual and is not something, like legalised medical euthanasia which has a broader and often dangerous impact on a society. Provided that the individual going through the transition process understands that changing superficial gender will not cure any underlying depression or other mental illnesses and the individual is not using transition as a form of fetish or a predator, then I have little problem with these individual choices.
However, my libertarian view of gender transition stops when it comes to the issue of treating children or indeed anyone under the age of 21 (an age when the brain has finally finished developing in most people). It’s becoming patently obvious to me and to many others that children and young people do not have the mental capacity or the ability to fully understand what they are getting into or what they are, in some cases, being guided into by parents and by the wider society.
In transgender clinic in Britain and around the world, children are being subjected to what are unethical medical experiments using drugs, such as puberty blockers, which are being used ‘off label for purposes that these drugs were not intended to be used. There are also concerns that children are being funneled into transition by peer pressure and what’s worse is the medical establishment is not doing enough to stop these children ruining their lives and possibly shortening them.
The backlash against this sort of trans-lunacy has been a long time coming and too many people have been intimidated by trans activists into not speaking up about medics who seem to be behaving like some sort of modern day mad scientist and basically experimenting on children. But, at last, someone who has worked within the field of gender transition, a nurse, has stepped forward on behalf of an autistic girl who is being pushed towards gender transition.
According to a report on the Sky News website, Susan Evans, a psychiatric nurse who has worked for the UK’s only Gender Identity clinic the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, is challenging the NHS in court over, among other things, the issue of the use of puberty blockers. Sky News said that ‘She left after becoming increasingly concerned that young children were being given “experimental treatment” without adequate assessments.’. These are I admit good grounds for wanting to leave this field.
Experimental treatments with drugs that are not being used for their original intention, should only be carried where there is no alternative to a treatment’s use or as a ‘last ditch’ attempt to save someone’s life. Having a distorted view of ones gender do not in my view come into the categories or either saving a life or there being no alternative. There is a far less damaging alternative for those children and teens who are gender confused and that is for the medical profession to take the option of doing no harm, by not treating the person for gender dysphoria until the patient has finished developing naturally.
Some of the allegations that Nurse Evans is making are seriously worrying. She is alleging that children are being pushed into medical transition by the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones without proper psychiatric assessment or involvement. She is also alleging that vocal and powerful trans activist groups are having an undue influence on what goes on at the clinic and on the treatments offered. This means that the beliefs of the trans activists may be having more of a say in how these children are treated than is sensible or ethical.
Sky News said of the mother of an autistic girl who is awaiting treatment by the Tavistock:
The case is also being brought on behalf of Mrs A, the mother of a 15-year-old autistic girl who is currently on the waiting list for treatment at the service.
Writing on the Crowd Justice online page to raise funds, Mrs A said: “I have deep concerns that the current clinical approach at GIDS means that my daughter will be subjected to an experimental treatment path that is not adequately regulated, where there are insufficient safeguards, where her autism will not be properly accounted for and where no-one (let alone my daughter) understands the risks and therefore cannot ensure informed consent is obtained.”
I find it difficult to disagree with what Mrs A has said here. These treatments are unregulated and experimental and there are no long term studies as to the potential negative effects of these allegedly ‘reversible’ puberty blockers. They are also unethical as children are unable to properly consent to the sort of treatment that will render them sterile and possibly still afflicted by whatever mental distress caused them to consider themselves trans in the first place. I very much doubt that this young girl understands or properly comprehends either the risks of the treatment nor the long term effects of them.
The claim made by Nurse Evans that at least 30% of the children presenting for gender reassignment are autistic or who have suffered from some previous psychological trauma should ring alarm bells for anyone who believes that medicine should be practised ethically. It is incredibly unethical in my opinion to put mentally damaged children through a course of treatment that they may not even need. In my view NHS funds should not be used merely to satisfy the curiousity of medics who have put gender ideology ahead of what is the patient’s best interest, which is what seems to me is happening. We should also not be funding those areas of medicine that have been captured by a trans community that is shackled to ideology and is mired in science denial.
As I’ve said earlier, not just in this piece but in others, for an adult over the age of 21 it is merely a case of someone exercising bodily autonomy if they choose to change the outward appearance of their gender using drugs and surgery. I have had a number of friends who have chosen to go down this route and I would not have dreamed about stopping them or attempting to stop them from doing so if they were of sound mind when they made the decision. But, these radical and often challenging and experimental treatments should not be done on children and young people and for doctors paid for by our taxes to do this to children strikes me as profoundly unethical.
The gender transitioning of children strikes me as having all the hallmarks of the sort of medical fads that appear among doctors from time to time. At certain points in psychiatric medical history, pointless and useless treatments such as hydrotherapy and more damaging ones such as leucotomy have been championed by doctors for the treatment of such ailments as bipolar disorder and depression. We look back from our viewpoint in more enlightened times quite rightly with a sense of horror at the idea of wrapping mental patients in ice cold wet blankets, or poking around in their brains with an ice pick. I foresee that in fifteen or twenty years time, when the extent of the damage done to these children in order to ‘treat’ their gender dysphoria, becomes more widely known and cases start to come before the civil courts, then we will view the sort of gender treatments dished out by the Tavistock and other similar gender clinics with a similar sense of disgust.
