Telegraph- Our worst fears about gender treatment have been confirmed in leaked documents
Our worst fears about gender treatment have been confirmed in leaked documents
The NHS used controversial guidance from US organisation World Professional Association for Transgender Health to help shape trans policies
Puberty blockers, the inevitable path to cross-sex hormones, double mastectomies and then various genital surgeries had become seen as a cure for gender-confused teenagers. To wonder about the ethics of this, with some of the treatments starting at age five, was to hate “the trans child”. Some parents had even decided their toddlers were trans.
The more I researched, the more disturbed I became, because it was clear that American practices and protocols were being adopted here. Every day, I received concerned emails from parents, doctors, teachers and therapists questioning the guidance they were meant to adhere to. They needed help. The kids they looked after needed help. But where was this guidance coming from? Who were the experts in this delicate field of gender-dysphoric children?
The standards of care often referred to as best practice by the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council and the Royal College of Psychiatrists came from an organisation called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
Many assumed this was an international professional body of highly qualified medics. It was not. Three-quarters of its members are based in the States and many are activists who advocate that anyone who identifies as trans may demand access to gender-confirming treatment, which for kids means puberty blockers.
They also provide material to shape healthcare. This is not a medical organisation with any formal authority. Anyone can pay a couple of hundred dollars to join it. In the UK, its standards of care have been used by the NHS, by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), by groups like Stonewall and Mermaids, Press for Change and, of course, by the Scottish Government.
Here, particularly women who have expressed doubts about the “transing” of children or the eroding of women’s rights, have been seen as immoral, as stopping an individual’s right to fundamental self-expression. Yet the more we knew about GIDS following the Cass Review (which resulted in the Tavistock clinic being shut down), the more we heard the voices of detransitioners, the more many of us were waiting for this scandal to blow.
I said years ago: “When history gets written and rewritten, it will become clear who ignored it even when given the evidence and who really didn’t care about teenage girls. Those who said nothing. We see you.”
And now we do see you. The WPATH files have been leaked and guess what? There is no vindication here, just appalling evidence of the maiming of young bodies. Some of this is not new information. Jazz Jennings, assigned male at birth, who appeared on a reality TV show and was put on blockers at 11, did not have enough genital material to make a neovagina so it was made from their stomach lining and then split apart involving at least three more corrective surgeries and much pain.
Marci Bowers, Jazz’s surgeon, who herself transitioned after fathering three children said that Jazz will never have an orgasm. Telling children that they can change “sex” when it means they will become infertile and have no sexual function is surely dishonest.
Realising that some of these kids have deep psychological issues but ignoring them is also surely malpractice. Scarlett Blake, the murderer who had also tortured a cat, is another ex-GIDS patient.
The WPATH leaks talk of mastectomies with no nipples, incontinence, and “nullification” – that is, creating eunuchs.
There are doctors talking of cancer caused by hormones in teenagers and operations where a fake vagina is made and the penis is kept too.
I could go into way more gruesome details but I will spare you. All of this happens because there is money to be made from deep distress, and medical insurance will actually pay for some of this.
But children? How have we allowed the care of some of our most disturbed children to be formulated by an organisation that in its latest standards of care thinks puberty blockers can be given at any age and that some boys may identity as “eunuch individuals”, in which case hormones may not be enough and “surgical care” may be needed. Apparently there is “a lack of awareness” about this within the general medical community. You don’t say? Who knew castrating boys does not sit too well alongside the Do No Harm motto.
All of this is sad beyond belief. Accusations of transphobia have stopped many professionals from seeing or telling the truth. When the preferred guidance is advising the chopping off of young, healthy flesh and to hell with the complications, this should not even be called medicine. It is mutilation. Sticking the word “gender” in front of it does not change the reality.
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