I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
It follows that the trans movement is inherently reactionary because it reinstates the normative gender roles that had previously been 'queered'.
No it doesn't. You know that there are masculine transfem lesbians, and feminine transmasc gay guys? You know that not all trans people change their bodies to fit gender stereotypes but to alleviate dysphoria? Like, you just seem to believe - sans any explanation or evidence - that wanting to have body modifications to alleviate gender dysphoria automatically means fitting normative gender roles. That isn't the case!
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
The systematic reviews commissioned to support the Cass Review did not limit on study type - there was no RCT restriction.
If there's something in the Cass review that excludes non-RCT evidence, please point to it.
Also, you can do a randomised trial without blinding - sometimes, where it's obvious who has received treatment, it's the only way. Double blind is gold standard, but it's tricky for e.g. the benefits of limb amputation.
(I'm not defending the Cass Review, which I haven't read in full and I do have some reservations about the Review. But I have knowledge of the systematic reviews commissioned to support the Review and it's simply false to say they excluded non-RCT evidence, if that is what you are claiming - e.g. the x-sex hormone review inclusion criteria states as included study types: "Clinical trials, cohort studies, case–control studies, cross-sectional studies, pre–post single-group design studies or service evaluations that provided treatment outcome data. Case studies and case series were excluded.")
You can see highlighted here how many studies were "downgraded" due to "lack of blinding and no control group"
The tweet describes those papers as "thrown out", but they weren't thrown out. They were downgraded. This is standard systematic review speak, even when blinding is impossible.
Stop looking at tweets by people who aren't familiar with systematic reviewing methods and look at what the actual report and published papers say.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
Shouldn't a truly emancipatory movement want to free people from the need to become dependent on a lifetime of medication?
What? I have depression which, given the family history of depression and suicide, is almost certainly somewhat biological. Is it a bad thing that I have to take antidepressants to help me not want to harm myself or end my life? A lot of people who are medicalised or disabled are done so by society at large - I agree with the social model of disability. But some people do need medical intervention all their life to participate in society or, you know, survive.
Of course it's a bad thing that you have to take antidepressants. Wouldn't you rather not need them?
Isn't the point of 'queering' geneder roles to allow people to express themselves freely regardless of their biological sex?
But I do need them - my brain is that way. It would be worse for me to need them and be told I can't have them.
Yes - and that includes the ability to modify their body for their comfort or even joy if they so wish.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I was given morphine when I was wheeled into A&E after an accident. I didn't see it for sale in Amazon Fresh (actually just a Morrisons) when I went in to buy a sandwich yesterday.
Pretty sure you can pick up drugs in certain aisles of the Calton Morrisons.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
Shouldn't a truly emancipatory movement want to free people from the need to become dependent on a lifetime of medication?
What? I have depression which, given the family history of depression and suicide, is almost certainly somewhat biological. Is it a bad thing that I have to take antidepressants to help me not want to harm myself or end my life? A lot of people who are medicalised or disabled are done so by society at large - I agree with the social model of disability. But some people do need medical intervention all their life to participate in society or, you know, survive.
Of course it's a bad thing that you have to take antidepressants. Wouldn't you rather not need them?
Isn't the point of 'queering' geneder roles to allow people to express themselves freely regardless of their biological sex?
But I do need them - my brain is that way. It would be worse for me to need them and be told I can't have them.
Yes - and that includes the ability to modify their body for their comfort or even joy if they so wish.
Do you believe that some brains come out of the womb programmed to require the lifetime assistance of antidepressants?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
Salience. One of the things that haunts me for election prediction. How salient is this for voter behavior?
It never comes up in the lists of issues ranked by voters in polls. They quote the economy, inflation, net zero, immigration, the NHS, education, national security, standards in public life. It's not even at ULEZ levels of salience.
One hopes that Susan Hall will soon be at ULEZ levels of salience !
Incidentally quite an interesting little 5-6 minute video from the Gabby Cabby channel, about why he will not be buying an Electric Cab.
I don't quite agree with him on the limited life of electric vehicle batteries, or the price differentials when taken as a business asset, but worth a listen.
The current electric black cabs seem to be remarkably crap.
Various people have been using electric vehicles as cabs for over a decade. There are some very high mileage battery packs out there. For good, water cooled designs, combined with moderately intelligent charging software there is strong evidence of longevity.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
I think that one of the merits of civilization and philosophy is that they give us the ability to escape from Darwinian pressure, should we choose to do so.
And, for the record, I chose my wife for her sparkling wit, her appreciation for fog, and her bright blue eyes - not her breast size.
1) You can't escape Darwinian pressure without killing everybody else. 2) Whilst true and speaks well of you, the point was that in a Darwinian situation people compete with other people for advantages: Cats compete with other cats to avoid the dogs, dogs compete with other dogs to prey on the cats. Your wife's happiness depended on there being enough Lost_Passwords to find her, so the numbers converge.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
Does the Cass Review say what 148grss claims on social transition? I'd be worried about that if so, but I've just read the summary on pages 163-165 and I don't see anything like that. It says "Parents should be encouraged to seek clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
I think that one of the merits of civilization and philosophy is that they give us the ability to escape from Darwinian pressure, should we choose to do so.
And, for the record, I chose my wife for her sparkling wit, her appreciation for fog, and her bright blue eyes - not her breast size.
I looked through all the comments to respond to and chose yours because it was interesting and mentioned me.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
Shouldn't a truly emancipatory movement want to free people from the need to become dependent on a lifetime of medication?
What? I have depression which, given the family history of depression and suicide, is almost certainly somewhat biological. Is it a bad thing that I have to take antidepressants to help me not want to harm myself or end my life? A lot of people who are medicalised or disabled are done so by society at large - I agree with the social model of disability. But some people do need medical intervention all their life to participate in society or, you know, survive.
Of course it's a bad thing that you have to take antidepressants. Wouldn't you rather not need them?
Isn't the point of 'queering' geneder roles to allow people to express themselves freely regardless of their biological sex?
But I do need them - my brain is that way. It would be worse for me to need them and be told I can't have them.
Yes - and that includes the ability to modify their body for their comfort or even joy if they so wish.
Do you believe that some brains come out of the womb programmed to require the lifetime assistance of antidepressants?
I believe that some people are more biologically predisposed to depression, and that this can be hereditary. I believe that SSRIs are shit and the evidence for their efficacy is bad (and I no longer take SSRIs). But the evidence for some antidepressants is better (and I take those). I know that some times I can manage without them, and some times I cannot - and that there have been times where if I were not on antidepressants I would not function nor would I still be alive.
Medical interventions are not inherently bad. If people need medicine to live, they should have it.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
I think you're trolling at this point, william.
At around £300 pa for testosterone, and given the relatively small size of the market, I doubt "big pharma" is particularly interested.
If you're lobbying to restrict the supply, should I say that you're doing the bidding of black marketeers ?
To give you an idea of how disengaged I became, the most startling quote I think I picked up by LT was "I don't know how I wee.". At which point I thought: "What ?!"
That may be a misapprehension of a slight conversational adjustment by LT going: "I don't know how I ... we ... (something something something)."
Watched to the end of the Farage one now. Quite a comfortable, fluent interview.
What nobody has explored in-depth so far is Truss's claim that she was forced to reverse the cancellation of the CT raise, a relatively low cost measure, and one that would have maintained the status quo, but no attempt was made to get her to reverse or alter the bigger stuff like the energy support package.
I can absolutely believe this to be true, because America has had a long term campaign to repatriate US businesses by forcing other nations into raising their CT levels. Biden himself intervened in the minibudget debate, so clearly the US was very much involved and would have taken the opportunity to apply pressure.
I am just curious as to the form this 'force' took. I know that Truss received a letter from Simon Case demanding that she change course or the UK wouldn't be able to service its debt - perhaps he was explicit in his letter that it was the CT freeze that had to go.
OT I see Simon Jenkins has gone off the deep end in the Guardian today claiming that the UK preventing missles and drones reaching Israel was ' interferring in the war in Gaza and prolonging the war'.
I'd not provide gender dysphoria services on the NHS other than mental health services, the budget is stretched enough as it is and if people wish to go down this path they should fund it privately.
One thing, I'd make it a strong recommendation to freeze gametes prior to transitioning, as fertility can (probably will) be irreparably damaged certainly for biological males and kids are likely to be very low on the agenda for a say 19 yr old transitioning but something people can and do change their minds about later
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
I think that one of the merits of civilization and philosophy is that they give us the ability to escape from Darwinian pressure, should we choose to do so.
And, for the record, I chose my wife for her sparkling wit, her appreciation for fog, and her bright blue eyes - not her breast size.
1) You can't escape Darwinian pressure without killing everybody else. 2) Whilst true and speaks well of you, the point was that in a Darwinian situation people compete with other people for advantages: Cats compete with other cats to avoid the dogs, dogs compete with other dogs to prey on the cats. Your wife's happiness depended on there being enough Lost_Passwords to find her, so the numbers converge.
Good job his wifes happiness doesnt depend on there being enough remembered passwords.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
Should we promote behaviours that prevent people from aquiring type 2 diabetes?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
Does the Cass Review say what 148grss claims on social transition? I'd be worried about that if so, but I've just read the summary on pages 163-165 and I don't see anything like that. It says "Parents should be encouraged to seek clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
I don't know.I was taking their claim at face value. But given how extreme and blinkered they are on this issue perhaps that was a mistake.
I endorse @Isam's post about the key issues. I would add some further thoughts.
The key paradox is how dare you police my gender vs you can't come into this space because it is safe.
I am not 100% clear in my mind why trans isn't just the new gay (which @148grss is essentially saying) because all kinds of objections are thrown up against trans people which were almost word for word used about homosexuality. I have no idea what we will consider, in 50 years time, a woman to be. The answer to the "new gay" question has only been answered, incompletely imo, by saying that being gay is something that you feel and can be with no external elements, whereas to be trans you "need" medical procedures. Puberty blockers, breast binding, mastectomies and all the other medical procedures that I am not going to cite in advance of my lunch. You can't just wake up and "be trans" because you need the paraphernalia of medical treatments and whatnot.
That said, I don't see how therapy for evidently deeply troubled children is a bad thing or is "conversion therapy". People have therapy for just about anything and this to me qualifies as a very good thing to have therapy about.
All I took from the Cass Interim Review (haven't yet read the full review) is that GIDS ignored the many other issues that their adolescent patients were suffering from and focused only on and treated the gender dysphoria.
My instinct is that any medical procedure for children should not be the first line of defence. I get that for some medication is important to "survive" but I would say that therapy can be as effective.
A friend's mother, who was very depressed some years ago, had ECT. The doctors at the time said that it was like banging the TV if it didn't work. They didn't really know what it did to the brain but it would shake everything up (literally) and when the pieces came down again there was a chance that the person would feel differently.
Mr. Gezou, I always forget if it was the 50s or 60s, but the US had a programme of sterilising those with low IQs. Naturally, that's viewed with horror today.
I did wonder (and mentioned) whether the reckless encouragement aimed at children to get them to make life-changing decisions (including sterilisation) would be seen horrendously in the future. Just at first glance, it seems nuts to try and divorce authority from the parents and invest it in children too young to vote, drink, drive, or have sex, while certain groups of people cheerlead from the sidelines and dogpile anyone who has any disagreements or questions as bigots.
You assume that parents oppose transitioning. It's clear from the Cass report that that is very often not the case. Children would not be referred or attend if their parent(s) did not bring them, particularly as the Tavistock was a national service requiring long journeys. Additionally, there was a wait of up to 4 years to be seen, once again requiring persistent parental motivation, and the majority of children had socially transitioned before they ever reached the Tavistock.
You may not approve of such parents, but it does seem that the majority were supportive of the treatments given, indeed desperate for treatment for distressed young people.
True, parents were desperate and many supportive and trusting of clinicians (as we all tend to be).
Also true that certain charities and pressure-groups tried to divorce authority from the parents.
Both things can be true.
Parents don't own their children - children are individual and separate human beings. Parents don't and should not have the right to dictate everything about their children's life. As a teen I had significant depression in part exacerbated by my relationship with my dad - I got antidepressants and treatment without his knowledge at 14 and that was a good thing. Many queer people know that their parents, unfortunately, do not always have positive reactions when their children come out - whether that's due to their sexuality or gender identity.
I think parents do 'own' their children, at least until they achieve majority. If we accept that children are not yet mature enough to make long-term decisions in their own interests - which I think we do e.g. we don't let children vote - then who, ultimately, makes the decisions? The parents. (I accept that there are edge cases where the state steps in e.g. in children of addicts incapable of caring for their children, but we are obviously not talking about that in the majority of cases). I grant that the relationship between child and parent may not always be perfect, but it is significantly more likely to be in the child's interests than transferring that responsiblity to the state.
This is not how other medicine works. If you have a 15-year old facing some difficult decision around a medical procedure -- say, whether to have a stoma -- you would usually have a discussion with the 15-year old and with their parents/legal guardians, together.
It is considered good practice to involve younger children in decision making, even below age 10, although you are putting less weight on the child's view as they get younger. The General Medical Council guidance says, "You should involve children and young people as much as possible in decisions about their care, even when they are not able to make decisions on their own."
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
Should we promote behaviours that prevent people from aquiring type 2 diabetes?
You know that ends with a ban on advertising doughnuts, yes?
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is.
I feel uncomfortable in my body. I feel uncomfortable in the world. I feel uncomfortable around other people. Is this because there's a problem with me, with my body, or because I have ASD and consequent social anxiety in a world that is hostile to my needs?
An anorexic feels uncomfortable in their body. Is there a problem with their body? Should we provide them with "affirming care" and prescribe them with appetite suppressants?
The trans arguments are completely bewildering to me. I've grown up with decades of arguments from feminists fighting for the right to own their bodies and not to have society tell them that their bodies are wrong and they need to do this or that to them to make them ready for the beach and male approval. And now it looks like so-called progressives are throwing that all away for the sake of an ideology that tells people that they are right to feel that their body is wrong.
Can you not see that the trans ideology is actually not progressive, that it is reactionary bullshit that tells people their problems are to do with defects in themselves, and not a result of the ways in which society is mistreating them? It's about placing the onus on individuals to change themselves to fit society, instead of changing society to fit individuals.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
And why does it take so much space here? Will it change votes for the government or Plaid Cymru? Will it bring forward the next election date? Can we bet on the number of certificates issued north and south of Hadrian's Wall? At least abortion in America does have electoral consequences.
Salience. One of the things that haunts me for election prediction. How salient is this for voter behavior?
It never comes up in the lists of issues ranked by voters in polls. They quote the economy, inflation, net zero, immigration, the NHS, education, national security, standards in public life. It's not even at ULEZ levels of salience.
One hopes that Susan Hall will soon be at ULEZ levels of salience !
Incidentally quite an interesting little 5-6 minute video from the Gabby Cabby channel, about why he will not be buying an Electric Cab.
I don't quite agree with him on the limited life of electric vehicle batteries, or the price differentials when taken as a business asset, but worth a listen.
You see a lot of hybrid black cabs around London these days, and aiui most London cabbies lease rather than buy their cabs outright. These hybrids are replacing the old diesel taxis. I'm not familiar with the work of Andy the Gabby Cabby but he mentions a minibus, airport trips and other drivers so presumably he is a minicab operator.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I was given morphine when I was wheeled into A&E after an accident. I didn't see it for sale in Amazon Fresh (actually just a Morrisons) when I went in to buy a sandwich yesterday.
Pretty sure you can pick up drugs in certain aisles of the Calton Morrisons.
Is Irn-Bru actually a proscribed substance?
But yes you can. Some aspirin, nurofen, cough mixture. Then there are some behind the counter. And then there are some that are only administered in extremis. I think morphine falls into this last category. So you are proving my point for me.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
Does the Cass Review say what 148grss claims on social transition? I'd be worried about that if so, but I've just read the summary on pages 163-165 and I don't see anything like that. It says "Parents should be encouraged to seek clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
I don't know.I was taking their claim at face value. But given how extreme and blinkered they are on this issue perhaps that was a mistake.
I suspect if you get 50 people interested in trans issues in a room you'll get at least 50 different interpretations of what the Cass Review says and - if you're lucky - 1 person who has actually read it.
(I have also not read it in full - I've skimmed the summaries on the main issues)
Yes, but it's about a thousand pounds a month. Thatcher was in office for about 138 months, so would have gotten about £140,000 plus an uplift for performance.
OT I see Simon Jenkins has gone off the deep end in the Guardian today claiming that the UK preventing missles and drones reaching Israel was ' interferring in the war in Gaza and prolonging the war'.
That’s a very bizarre conclusion to draw . If loads of missiles had landed it would now be all out war . The west would have even less influence on Israel .
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
I think you're trolling at this point, william.
At around £300 pa for testosterone, and given the relatively small size of the market, I doubt "big pharma" is particularly interested.
If you're lobbying to restrict the supply, should I say that you're doing the bidding of black marketeers ?
But to play devil's advocate, the medicalisation of confused teens who may be gay would vastly expand that market wouldn't it? That's classic marketing with a great deal of historical precedent.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I was given morphine when I was wheeled into A&E after an accident. I didn't see it for sale in Amazon Fresh (actually just a Morrisons) when I went in to buy a sandwich yesterday.
Pretty sure you can pick up drugs in certain aisles of the Calton Morrisons.
Is Irn-Bru actually a proscribed substance?
But yes you can. Some aspirin, nurofen, cough mixture. Then there are some behind the counter. And then there are some that are only administered in extremis. I think morphine falls into this last category. So you are proving my point for me.
Sorry, it was a Glasgow centric joke. I shouldn't expect you to be an expert on everything.
OT I see Simon Jenkins has gone off the deep end in the Guardian today claiming that the UK preventing missles and drones reaching Israel was ' interferring in the war in Gaza and prolonging the war'.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
Does the Cass Review say what 148grss claims on social transition? I'd be worried about that if so, but I've just read the summary on pages 163-165 and I don't see anything like that. It says "Parents should be encouraged to seek clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
She also notes that can take three years.
It's not unknown for those providing clinical oversight to have their own agendas, either.
Anecdotally, those in the NHS my son came across were either neutral but challenging, or actively hostile.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
Should we promote behaviours that prevent people from aquiring type 2 diabetes?
You know that ends with a ban on advertising doughnuts, yes?
Not necessarily. A better solution might be to employ AI robots to go around forcing people to get out of bed and exercise before 7am. It would probably reduce depression too.
Four pages of comments about trans, and transfem mascbois. It’s like one of those manias that afflicts African countries, when ghost monkeys make everyone faint, or albinos are accused of bewitching the President. We have all ingested ergotine
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is.
I feel uncomfortable in my body. I feel uncomfortable in the world. I feel uncomfortable around other people. Is this because there's a problem with me, with my body, or because I have ASD and consequent social anxiety in a world that is hostile to my needs?
An anorexic feels uncomfortable in their body. Is there a problem with their body? Should we provide them with "affirming care" and prescribe them with appetite suppressants?
The trans arguments are completely bewildering to me. I've grown up with decades of arguments from feminists fighting for the right to own their bodies and not to have society tell them that their bodies are wrong and they need to do this or that to them to make them ready for the beach and male approval. And now it looks like so-called progressives are throwing that all away for the sake of an ideology that tells people that they are right to feel that their body is wrong.
Can you not see that the trans ideology is actually not progressive, that it is reactionary bullshit that tells people their problems are to do with defects in themselves, and not a result of the ways in which society is mistreating them? It's about placing the onus on individuals to change themselves to fit society, instead of changing society to fit individuals.
OT I see Simon Jenkins has gone off the deep end in the Guardian today claiming that the UK preventing missles and drones reaching Israel was ' interferring in the war in Gaza and prolonging the war'.
Some of the madder, Religious Anti-ABM*, types assert that the Iron Dome system both doesn’t work and is immoral.
It doesn’t work because it is an Anti-ABM system. And it is immoral because it stops rocket attacks - preventing the Palestinians striking back.
They also bang on about Arrow.
*Started in the 70s. It’s a creed that all missile defence can’t work, mustn’t work and would destroy the would have it did work. Which it doesn’t.
Yes this was one of the tenets of MAD: that ABM systems would disrupt the equilibrium and make nuclear armageddon more likely. You can sort of understand the wider logic during the Cold War, but in an Iran-Israel conventional context it makes no sense at all. Might as well argue knights shouldn't don armour and castles shouldn't have thick walls.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I was given morphine when I was wheeled into A&E after an accident. I didn't see it for sale in Amazon Fresh (actually just a Morrisons) when I went in to buy a sandwich yesterday.
Pretty sure you can pick up drugs in certain aisles of the Calton Morrisons.
Is Irn-Bru actually a proscribed substance?
But yes you can. Some aspirin, nurofen, cough mixture. Then there are some behind the counter. And then there are some that are only administered in extremis. I think morphine falls into this last category. So you are proving my point for me.
Sorry, it was a Glasgow centric joke. I shouldn't expect you to be an expert on everything.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is.
I feel uncomfortable in my body. I feel uncomfortable in the world. I feel uncomfortable around other people. Is this because there's a problem with me, with my body, or because I have ASD and consequent social anxiety in a world that is hostile to my needs?
An anorexic feels uncomfortable in their body. Is there a problem with their body? Should we provide them with "affirming care" and prescribe them with appetite suppressants?
The trans arguments are completely bewildering to me. I've grown up with decades of arguments from feminists fighting for the right to own their bodies and not to have society tell them that their bodies are wrong and they need to do this or that to them to make them ready for the beach and male approval. And now it looks like so-called progressives are throwing that all away for the sake of an ideology that tells people that they are right to feel that their body is wrong.
Can you not see that the trans ideology is actually not progressive, that it is reactionary bullshit that tells people their problems are to do with defects in themselves, and not a result of the ways in which society is mistreating them? It's about placing the onus on individuals to change themselves to fit society, instead of changing society to fit individuals.
People will always adapt to the world and adapt the world to them. Societal pressures are not the sole driver of behavior. Trans ideology succeeded trans people, not preceded them.
You think - correct me if wrong - trans behavior is externally imposed and should be prevented/dissuaded. I think people do weird stuff because they're people and should be neither prevented nor encouraged. I understand your position (I think?), but mine is different.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is.
I feel uncomfortable in my body. I feel uncomfortable in the world. I feel uncomfortable around other people. Is this because there's a problem with me, with my body, or because I have ASD and consequent social anxiety in a world that is hostile to my needs?
An anorexic feels uncomfortable in their body. Is there a problem with their body? Should we provide them with "affirming care" and prescribe them with appetite suppressants?
The trans arguments are completely bewildering to me. I've grown up with decades of arguments from feminists fighting for the right to own their bodies and not to have society tell them that their bodies are wrong and they need to do this or that to them to make them ready for the beach and male approval. And now it looks like so-called progressives are throwing that all away for the sake of an ideology that tells people that they are right to feel that their body is wrong.
Can you not see that the trans ideology is actually not progressive, that it is reactionary bullshit that tells people their problems are to do with defects in themselves, and not a result of the ways in which society is mistreating them? It's about placing the onus on individuals to change themselves to fit society, instead of changing society to fit individuals.
Anorexia is not alleviated by telling people that they are correct in how they view their body; dysphoria often is alleviated when treated medically.
Trans affirming healthcare is in no way conflicting with the idea that women need not feel their body should cater to patriarchal ideals of femininity. Indeed - it is the fact that trans affirming healthcare leads to this outcome (women who men perceive as women but may have a penis) that it is hated; because patriarchy demands that "men" should not ever feel a preference to be a woman, and that "women" should be there for the male gaze and not themselves. You need only look at those who constantly scream "look at what they took from us" when discussing Elliot Page's transition to see that many men hate transition specifically because it calls into question that "female" bodies belong to them. Transitioning is not about making people fit to society - which should be clear when the power centres of society that typically enforce patriarchal norms are the same ones arguing against transitioning. Butler is very good at explaining this - you should listen to some of their recent interviews ahead of their new book coming out.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
Does the Cass Review say what 148grss claims on social transition? I'd be worried about that if so, but I've just read the summary on pages 163-165 and I don't see anything like that. It says "Parents should be encouraged to seek clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
She also notes that can take three years.
It's not unknown for those providing clinical oversight to have their own agendas, either.
Anecdotally, those in the NHS my son came across were either neutral but challenging, or actively hostile.
If you don't mind me asking - at the GIDS, or elsewhere?
Re the delays, well - quite. But it is the place of the Review to recommend what should be and not be entirely constrained by what is. Everybody should be able to see, in a timely manner, someone who can talk them through the various options, explore other explanations for the symptoms and summarise - as far as possible - the evidence for and against various pathways.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I think that if you take puberty blockers for a limited period then they would be reversible. But there have been people who have taken them for long enough that the effects are permanent.
That seems to be the difference between taking them for treatment of precocious puberty and to prevent puberty happening at all.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
Should we promote behaviours that prevent people from aquiring type 2 diabetes?
You know that ends with a ban on advertising doughnuts, yes?
Not necessarily. A better solution might be to employ AI robots to go around forcing people to get out of bed and exercise before 7am. It would probably reduce depression too.
A modest proposal. Shoot fat people pour encourager les autres. It's the only way to larn them.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I was given morphine when I was wheeled into A&E after an accident. I didn't see it for sale in Amazon Fresh (actually just a Morrisons) when I went in to buy a sandwich yesterday.
Pretty sure you can pick up drugs in certain aisles of the Calton Morrisons.
Is Irn-Bru actually a proscribed substance?
But yes you can. Some aspirin, nurofen, cough mixture. Then there are some behind the counter. And then there are some that are only administered in extremis. I think morphine falls into this last category. So you are proving my point for me.
Sorry, it was a Glasgow centric joke. I shouldn't expect you to be an expert on everything.
Let's analogise the Cass review to a different demographic.
Imagine that a review of women's reproductive healthcare took place (with a focus on abortion), and the response from most women was one of shock and horror at the reviews methodology, findings and conclusions. Imagine that the review overwhelmingly cited anti-abortion activists, and ignored or downgraded the significance of multiple studies that talked about the medical reality of abortions. Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions. Imagine that women's advocacy groups, doctors and charities made multiple public statements about how this review is clearly biased and not in line with the scientific evidence. And imagine that despite all this, the politics surrounding the review have been lead by political parties and activists and a media climate that has stoked anti-abortion narratives for years and years.
That is what this review is. It is a political hatchet job. Politicians and journalists in the UK are happy with the outcomes, but doctors who specialise in this area and the people it will effect are not.
That's now what the review is. I am still reading it. One can, I'm sure, disagree with it, but it is misleading to exaggerate as you are now doing.
For example, you suggest, "Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions." The Cass review has not acted anything like that. They spoke extensively to trans young people, they spoke to trans adults, they spoke to parents of trans young people, they spoke to medical practitioners in this area.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
They did talk to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and they did consult with practitioners in the field. Read what the report said; it's available here, https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/ . You can start with the graphic on p. 23. Where is this misinformation coming from?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
I think that if you take puberty blockers for a limited period then they would be reversible. But there have been people who have taken them for long enough that the effects are permanent.
That seems to be the difference between taking them for treatment of precocious puberty and to prevent puberty happening at all.
I mean - the people who take them to prevent puberty happening at all want that to happen - that is the desired effect. They then take cross sex hormones. That people choose to not reverse the effects of puberty blockers is not the same as saying they aren't reversible when they clearly are.
"Britain has no business intervening in the war in Gaza. So why did it defend Israel against Iran?" Simon Jenkins
Get that title and also the first sentence:
"Britain’s use of its air force to defend Israel against Iran at the weekend was an emphatic intervention in the war in Gaza."
His answer is that British policy under foreign secretary David Cameron is predicated on the idea that Britain should play the role of world policeman.
That is actually crap. As Jenkins himself points out, Britain hasn't protected Ukraine in the same way it's protected Israel. One could also cite about a million other occasions since the days of the Mau Mau when there's been trouble among the fuzzy-wuzzies and the rodbacked poshies haven't had a signal from the US to send in the gunboats. He asks a good question, though.
I reckon there's disquiet at the FCO.
1. As any fule kno, the FCO has many Arab friends and some at the FCO have jolly sincere respect for Arabic-speaking oriental types from former British possessions or stomping grounds who are sitting on huge mounds of money that they love to splash about. They sincerely wish to be liked by their friends, just as everyone does. (Who would bail out Barclays next time, otherwise?)
2. See the reports of which Israeli sites were targeted. Many mention the Nevatim airbase in the Negev plus a second target in the Negev. Some say two sites: Nevatim and Mount Hermon. Well Mount Hermon can't be the second site in the Negev because it's nowhere near the Negev. It's close to the tripoint where unoccupied Lebanon and unoccupied Syria meet the Israeli-occupied Golan. Hmmmmm...... A site that comes to mind in the Negev that isn't Nevatim is of course the nuclear place at Dimona. Whichever way you look at it, the foreign ministers of the world's great powers will be interested in what may or may not happen at Dimona for obvious reasons.
3. Don't forget that on the very same day (1 April) that Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus they also murdered aid workers in Gaza, including British citizens - British former service personnel, in fact, who were in Gaza playing a security role, including one guy who is known to have served in the SBS - all stabbed in the back by the IDF.
4. Although Jenkins may be channelling disquiet, he's probably mostly functioning as a safety valve. If he really wanted to fuck shit up, he'd call on Sunak and Cameron to publish all the details of Britain's defence treaty with Israel. Then at least we might learn what military treaty commitments towards Israel Britain actually has, and what Britain gets in return.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
They did talk to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and they did consult with practitioners in the field. Read what the report said; it's available here, https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/ . You can start with the graphic on p. 23. Where is this misinformation coming from?
The qualitative research mentioned in that diagram specifically interviewed:
Young people who had been referred to the Tavistock
The parents of young people who had been referred to the Tavistock
Clinicians currently and formerly at the Tavistock
That being in addition to the direct contact the Review team had with such people.
ETA: Appendix 3 of the report has the summary of the qualitative research. ETA2: It's astonishing how many people are making claims that are easily disproved by even a cursory skim of the Review.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
Should we promote behaviours that prevent people from aquiring type 2 diabetes?
You know that ends with a ban on advertising doughnuts, yes?
Not necessarily. A better solution might be to employ AI robots to go around forcing people to get out of bed and exercise before 7am. It would probably reduce depression too.
A modest proposal. Shoot fat people pour encourager les autres. It's the only way to larn them.
And on that uncontroversial point, back to work.
A noble attempt to divert the discussion from trans, but I fear a futile one.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I couldn't care less how well or how badly the current Conservative Party finish at the next election so long as it at least second. My fear is hubris by, for example Labour and the casual error by voters that a Labour win and a Conservative loss is inevitable, and this outcome is erroneously taken for granted. They can still win. Not a vote has yet been cast.
I would like to see the Conservative Party jettison the extremists and come back as a centre-right one nation edition. Hopefully too, the latest Farage electoral vehicle will wither and die. I also hope any future Conservative Party allow him and his fellow travellers nowhere near them.
OT I see Simon Jenkins has gone off the deep end in the Guardian today claiming that the UK preventing missles and drones reaching Israel was ' interferring in the war in Gaza and prolonging the war'.
Some of the madder, Religious Anti-ABM*, types assert that the Iron Dome system both doesn’t work and is immoral.
It doesn’t work because it is an Anti-ABM system. And it is immoral because it stops rocket attacks - preventing the Palestinians striking back.
They also bang on about Arrow.
*Started in the 70s. It’s a creed that all missile defence can’t work, mustn’t work and would destroy the would have it did work. Which it doesn’t.
Yes this was one of the tenets of MAD: that ABM systems would disrupt the equilibrium and make nuclear armageddon more likely. You can sort of understand the wider logic during the Cold War, but in an Iran-Israel conventional context it makes no sense at all. Might as well argue knights shouldn't don armour and castles shouldn't have thick walls.
MAD disruption is the sane argument.
The crazy version is people saying Iron Dome doesn’t hit anything - while we watch video of rockets not landing on the ground because they’ve been blown up. By being hit by interceptors. Also on video.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
Yeah - the Tavistock clinic wasn't great; but if you talk to patients there they would say that's due to unnecessary gate keeping and waiting, not that they were put on a fast track to medical interventions they didn't want. Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated - I could get testosterone blockers if I didn't want to see the effects of my male pattern baldness, and a woman going through the menopause could get HRT easily meeting with just the GP (or even over the counter). The pill has huge hormonal impacts on people - and many children (under 18s) take it all the time. For some reason it must be different for trans people, and that's because in the UK the ideological conclusion of most structures is to try to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible - even if those people want to and would benefit from it.
You write that, "Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated". One of the recommendations of the Cass review is to stop healthcare for trans people being segregated.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I've had the carrot of a monumental Tory wipeout dangled in front of me for a while now. I *will* be disappointed to have that taken away from me.
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
Well, in that case perhaps you need to grow up?
I remember being "disappointed" didn't go below 200 MPs on the night of GE2019. I was rightly called out on it then by a Labour supporter for childishness, and you need to be so now as well.
This isn't football. Nor is it an amusing drama for your entertainment. The country needs an effective opposition for democratic representation and good governance.
"Britain has no business intervening in the war in Gaza. So why did it defend Israel against Iran?" Simon Jenkins
Get that title and also the first sentence:
"Britain’s use of its air force to defend Israel against Iran at the weekend was an emphatic intervention in the war in Gaza."
His answer is that British policy under foreign secretary David Cameron is predicated on the idea that Britain should play the role of world policeman.
That is actually crap. As Jenkins himself points out, Britain hasn't protected Ukraine in the same way it's protected Israel. One could also cite about a million other occasions since the days of the Mau Mau when there's been trouble among the fuzzy-wuzzies and the rodbacked poshies haven't had a signal from the US to send in the gunboats. He asks a good question, though.
I reckon there's disquiet at the FCO.
1. As any fule kno, the FCO has many Arab friends and some at the FCO have jolly sincere respect for Arabic-speaking oriental types from former British possessions or stomping grounds who are sitting on huge mounds of money that they love to splash about. They sincerely wish to be liked by their friends, just as everyone does. (Who would bail out Barclays next time, otherwise?)
2. See the reports of which Israeli sites were targeted. Many mention the Nevatim airbase in the Negev plus a second target in the Negev. Some say two sites: Nevatim and Mount Hermon. Well Mount Hermon can't be the second site in the Negev because it's nowhere near the Negev. It's close to the tripoint where unoccupied Lebanon and unoccupied Syria meet the Israeli-occupied Golan. Hmmmmm...... A site that comes to mind in the Negev that isn't Nevatim is of course the nuclear place at Dimona. Whichever way you look at it, the foreign ministers of the world's great powers will be interested in what may or may not happen at Dimona for obvious reasons.
3. Don't forget that on the very same day (1 April) that Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus they also murdered aid workers in Gaza, including British citizens - British former service personnel, in fact, who were in Gaza playing a security role, including one guy who is known to have served in the SBS - all stabbed in the back by the IDF.
4. Although Jenkins may be channelling disquiet, he's probably mostly functioning as a safety valve. If he really wanted to fuck shit up, he'd call on Sunak and Cameron to publish all the details of Britain's defence treaty with Israel. Then at least we might learn what military treaty commitments towards Israel Britain actually has, and what Britain gets in return.
Again you use the term 'treaty' which is incorrect for he reasons I mentioned in reply to you the other day. Pacts, deals and agreements, whether for trade, defence, cultural exchanges or myriad other issues of joint interst are not treaties and do not fall under the UN or the Vienna Convention definition of treaties.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
Shouldn't a truly emancipatory movement want to free people from the need to become dependent on a lifetime of medication?
What? I have depression which, given the family history of depression and suicide, is almost certainly somewhat biological. Is it a bad thing that I have to take antidepressants to help me not want to harm myself or end my life? A lot of people who are medicalised or disabled are done so by society at large - I agree with the social model of disability. But some people do need medical intervention all their life to participate in society or, you know, survive.
Of course it's a bad thing that you have to take antidepressants. Wouldn't you rather not need them?
Isn't the point of 'queering' geneder roles to allow people to express themselves freely regardless of their biological sex?
But I do need them - my brain is that way. It would be worse for me to need them and be told I can't have them.
Yes - and that includes the ability to modify their body for their comfort or even joy if they so wish.
I don't accept that my brain requires anti-depressants indefinitely to prevent suicide. I prefer to believe that I suffer mostly for two reasons - because our capitalist society creates depression by dividing people, and because I, as an individual, haven't yet found the non-pharmaceutical coping methods to survive until the Revolution creates a society of mutual support, rather than competition and suspicion.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
Does the Cass Review say what 148grss claims on social transition? I'd be worried about that if so, but I've just read the summary on pages 163-165 and I don't see anything like that. It says "Parents should be encouraged to seek clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
She also notes that can take three years.
It's not unknown for those providing clinical oversight to have their own agendas, either.
Anecdotally, those in the NHS my son came across were either neutral but challenging, or actively hostile.
If you don't mind me asking - at the GIDS, or elsewhere?
Re the delays, well - quite. But it is the place of the Review to recommend what should be and not be entirely constrained by what is. Everybody should be able to see, in a timely manner, someone who can talk them through the various options, explore other explanations for the symptoms and summarise - as far as possible - the evidence for and against various pathways.
No, just NHS gender identity services, not that clinic. Of course the argument over all this has almost entirely conflated the two things.
The report is, of course, likely to exacerbate delays (as the Leeds NHS site noted), and pressures on funding aren't likely to see much improvement - probably the reverse.
OT I see Simon Jenkins has gone off the deep end in the Guardian today claiming that the UK preventing missles and drones reaching Israel was ' interferring in the war in Gaza and prolonging the war'.
That is obviously ridiculous because the dispute between Israel and Iran has no particular relevance to the dispute in Gaza. It arises out of entirely separate acts by Israel in response to separate acts by Iran or their surrogates.
I think the more dangerous part of his argument is that the UK has no right playing the world policeman. On our own that is self-evidently true but is it a bad thing for us (along with France and, more covertly, other counties), to assist the world's actual policeman, the United States, in keeping order? I don't think so. If Iron dome had failed thousands of people now alive would have died. How on earth is that not a good thing?
Can someone open up a trans issue free thread . Enough already ! I say live and let live but for the love of God no more !
Quite
I miss XL Bully chat. Those were the good old days on PB. When we’d discuss the latest mauling, post videos of kids being brutally chewed up, gossip about potential face transplants for ravaged victims. Now it’s trans trans trans trans trans trans
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
Should we promote behaviours that prevent people from aquiring type 2 diabetes?
You know that ends with a ban on advertising doughnuts, yes?
Not necessarily. A better solution might be to employ AI robots to go around forcing people to get out of bed and exercise before 7am. It would probably reduce depression too.
A modest proposal. Shoot fat people pour encourager les autres. It's the only way to larn them.
And on that uncontroversial point, back to work.
A noble attempt to divert the discussion from trans, but I fear a futile one.
Of course, fat trans people have* particularly dense fat due to the hormone treatments, which probably** makes them invulnerable to bullets which are unable to penetrate the fat to any vital organs.
*citation needed **citation needed, if it wasn't clearly bollocks - I remember an article suggesting the about 60cm of fat could stop a 9mm bullet, which is maybe fine if you're very fat and your assailant obliging fires at the fattiest part
Let's analogise the Cass review to a different demographic.
Imagine that a review of women's reproductive healthcare took place (with a focus on abortion), and the response from most women was one of shock and horror at the reviews methodology, findings and conclusions. Imagine that the review overwhelmingly cited anti-abortion activists, and ignored or downgraded the significance of multiple studies that talked about the medical reality of abortions. Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions. Imagine that women's advocacy groups, doctors and charities made multiple public statements about how this review is clearly biased and not in line with the scientific evidence. And imagine that despite all this, the politics surrounding the review have been lead by political parties and activists and a media climate that has stoked anti-abortion narratives for years and years.
That is what this review is. It is a political hatchet job. Politicians and journalists in the UK are happy with the outcomes, but doctors who specialise in this area and the people it will effect are not.
That's now what the review is. I am still reading it. One can, I'm sure, disagree with it, but it is misleading to exaggerate as you are now doing.
For example, you suggest, "Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions." The Cass review has not acted anything like that. They spoke extensively to trans young people, they spoke to trans adults, they spoke to parents of trans young people, they spoke to medical practitioners in this area.
Don't make shit up, 148grss.
One senses you are seeing the light this morning. Good to see.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
"Britain has no business intervening in the war in Gaza. So why did it defend Israel against Iran?" Simon Jenkins
Get that title and also the first sentence:
"Britain’s use of its air force to defend Israel against Iran at the weekend was an emphatic intervention in the war in Gaza."
His answer is that British policy under foreign secretary David Cameron is predicated on the idea that Britain should play the role of world policeman.
That is actually crap. As Jenkins himself points out, Britain hasn't protected Ukraine in the same way it's protected Israel. One could also cite about a million other occasions since the days of the Mau Mau when there's been trouble among the fuzzy-wuzzies and the rodbacked poshies haven't had a signal from the US to send in the gunboats. He asks a good question, though.
I reckon there's disquiet at the FCO.
1. As any fule kno, the FCO has many Arab friends and some at the FCO have jolly sincere respect for Arabic-speaking oriental types from former British possessions or stomping grounds who are sitting on huge mounds of money that they love to splash about. They sincerely wish to be liked by their friends, just as everyone does. (Who would bail out Barclays next time, otherwise?)
2. See the reports of which Israeli sites were targeted. Many mention the Nevatim airbase in the Negev plus a second target in the Negev. Some say two sites: Nevatim and Mount Hermon. Well Mount Hermon can't be the second site in the Negev because it's nowhere near the Negev. It's close to the tripoint where unoccupied Lebanon and unoccupied Syria meet the Israeli-occupied Golan. Hmmmmm...... A site that comes to mind in the Negev that isn't Nevatim is of course the nuclear place at Dimona. Whichever way you look at it, the foreign ministers of the world's great powers will be interested in what may or may not happen at Dimona for obvious reasons.
3. Don't forget that on the very same day (1 April) that Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus they also murdered aid workers in Gaza, including British citizens - British former service personnel, in fact, who were in Gaza playing a security role, including one guy who is known to have served in the SBS - all stabbed in the back by the IDF.
4. Although Jenkins may be channelling disquiet, he's probably mostly functioning as a safety valve. If he really wanted to fuck shit up, he'd call on Sunak and Cameron to publish all the details of Britain's defence treaty with Israel. Then at least we might learn what military treaty commitments towards Israel Britain actually has, and what Britain gets in return.
Which Arab powers want to see Iran succeed here? Certainly not the ones sitting opposite Iran on huge piles of liquid gold.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
Yeah - the Tavistock clinic wasn't great; but if you talk to patients there they would say that's due to unnecessary gate keeping and waiting, not that they were put on a fast track to medical interventions they didn't want. Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated - I could get testosterone blockers if I didn't want to see the effects of my male pattern baldness, and a woman going through the menopause could get HRT easily meeting with just the GP (or even over the counter). The pill has huge hormonal impacts on people - and many children (under 18s) take it all the time. For some reason it must be different for trans people, and that's because in the UK the ideological conclusion of most structures is to try to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible - even if those people want to and would benefit from it.
You write that, "Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated". One of the recommendations of the Cass review is to stop healthcare for trans people being segregated.
Come on, you're being unfair! You're actually reading it!
I’m really surprised by that Redfield and Wilton poll .
I thought Street was popular in the West Midlands . They also published a GE voter intention poll for the region which was horrific for the Tories .
The poll is still significantly closer than the Westminster voting intention polling for the West Midlands, so there does seem to be an incumbency effect of some sort, just drowned out by the general party political swing.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
I think that one of the merits of civilization and philosophy is that they give us the ability to escape from Darwinian pressure, should we choose to do so.
And, for the record, I chose my wife for her sparkling wit, her appreciation for fog, and her bright blue eyes - not her breast size.
1) You can't escape Darwinian pressure without killing everybody else. 2) Whilst true and speaks well of you, the point was that in a Darwinian situation people compete with other people for advantages: Cats compete with other cats to avoid the dogs, dogs compete with other dogs to prey on the cats. Your wife's happiness depended on there being enough Lost_Passwords to find her, so the numbers converge.
It's true to say that we can't escape selective pressure, in the absence of an infinite population, but we could vary the criteria on which the selective pressure occurs. For example, the selective pressure might select for people with a futile desire to escape from selective pressure.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
People feel uncomfortable in their own body, regardless of society. That's what dysphoria is. Lots of trans people I know present and are seen and gendered how they wish to be - and still they get dysphoria sometimes. Sometimes it is so extreme they would rather have surgery to help manage that.
It is also the case that the Cass review argues that young people shouldn't do the other things that could alleviate dysphoria that are not surgery - calling social transitioning (literally using a different name and clothes associated with the preferred gender) something that shouldn't be done without clinical oversight. Which, outside of being actions that are clearly very reversible and not making physical changes to anyone, seems to be impossible to actually enforce without saying that cross dressing or gender neutral nicknames are not allowed without the permission of a doctor?
Yep I think that in that area the Cass report is simply wrong. I assume that George Kirrin would fall foul of that particular prohibition.
Does the Cass Review say what 148grss claims on social transition? I'd be worried about that if so, but I've just read the summary on pages 163-165 and I don't see anything like that. It says "Parents should be encouraged to seek clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
She also notes that can take three years.
It's not unknown for those providing clinical oversight to have their own agendas, either.
Anecdotally, those in the NHS my son came across were either neutral but challenging, or actively hostile.
If you don't mind me asking - at the GIDS, or elsewhere?
Re the delays, well - quite. But it is the place of the Review to recommend what should be and not be entirely constrained by what is. Everybody should be able to see, in a timely manner, someone who can talk them through the various options, explore other explanations for the symptoms and summarise - as far as possible - the evidence for and against various pathways.
No, just NHS gender identity services, not that clinic. Of course the argument over all this has almost entirely conflated the two things.
The report is, of course, likely to exacerbate delays (as the Leeds NHS site noted), and pressures on funding aren't likely to see much improvement - probably the reverse.
The Sandyford in Scotland has been advertising the post for head of the clinic for more than 5 months now at a salary of £138k for a 24 hour week. No takers.
And there is not even a contractual condition that you have to be in the virtual stocks for so many hours a week for people to scream abuse at. That may be implied though.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Four pages of comments about trans, and transfem mascbois. It’s like one of those manias that afflicts African countries, when ghost monkeys make everyone faint, or albinos are accused of bewitching the President. We have all ingested ergotine
Perhaps even more so the penis stealing manias - where gents genuinely seem to believe that someone has stolen their todger.
Politicians from all parties calling for a separate Scottish review after the #CassReport are guilty of the most fatuous Scottish exceptionalism. Just how do they suppose it would improve upon this detailed years long process led by a senior clinician?
Both Labour and the SNP have behaved poorly to some of their courageous and principled women MPs who trod a lonely path for years, pointing out what since Class has said it all of a sudden seems obvious to their Front Benches.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
You are doing the bidding of Big Pharma, helping them medicalise people and turn them into lifetime customers.
Hey - I'm happy to nationalise all medicine production and not let any profits go to private companies. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get stuff they need. Like, should we let diabetics die instead of giving them insulin because insulin sales help Big Pharma?
Should we promote behaviours that prevent people from aquiring type 2 diabetes?
You know that ends with a ban on advertising doughnuts, yes?
Not necessarily. A better solution might be to employ AI robots to go around forcing people to get out of bed and exercise before 7am. It would probably reduce depression too.
A modest proposal. Shoot fat people pour encourager les autres. It's the only way to larn them.
And on that uncontroversial point, back to work.
A noble attempt to divert the discussion from trans, but I fear a futile one.
Of course, fat trans people have* particularly dense fat due to the hormone treatments, which probably** makes them invulnerable to bullets which are unable to penetrate the fat to any vital organs.
*citation needed **citation needed, if it wasn't clearly bollocks - I remember an article suggesting the about 60cm of fat could stop a 9mm bullet, which is maybe fine if you're very fat and your assailant obliging fires at the fattiest part
So that's why health experts are so concerned about trans-fats?
Four pages of comments about trans, and transfem mascbois. It’s like one of those manias that afflicts African countries, when ghost monkeys make everyone faint, or albinos are accused of bewitching the President. We have all ingested ergotine
Perhaps even more so the penis stealing manias - where gents genuinely seem to believe that someone has stolen their todger.
Yes I thought of them but I reckoned it would obscure my point
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
I don't know. I never expect such arguments to have a coherent ideology behind them. At least not oen I can understand.
Like 148grss my daughter has Trans friends who do not try to undermine her own lived experience or sexuality. My point was that there are extremists who do.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
Yeah - the Tavistock clinic wasn't great; but if you talk to patients there they would say that's due to unnecessary gate keeping and waiting, not that they were put on a fast track to medical interventions they didn't want. Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated - I could get testosterone blockers if I didn't want to see the effects of my male pattern baldness, and a woman going through the menopause could get HRT easily meeting with just the GP (or even over the counter). The pill has huge hormonal impacts on people - and many children (under 18s) take it all the time. For some reason it must be different for trans people, and that's because in the UK the ideological conclusion of most structures is to try to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible - even if those people want to and would benefit from it.
You write that, "Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated". One of the recommendations of the Cass review is to stop healthcare for trans people being segregated.
And that would be good - if it didn't also recommend not giving kids trans healthcare if they want and need it.
This is very obviously a 'who is in charge of the discourse' bit of litigation as no-one is going to mention the obvious truth that actual, as opposed to performative, prayer thankfully can be neither compelled nor forbidden, being as it is a disposition of the heart and mind. (See Jesus and all the spiritual greats passim).
Long suffering pupils might want to reflect on the Benedictine tradition of 'laborare est orare' which roughly translates for schoolchildren: Prayer is double physics.
Looking at various swing seats there truly is lashings of hopium in that methodology. Tories clinging on by a percent or two with Labour and LibDems massively splitting the vote.
In the social media age? In the odd seat that is bound to happen. But this has it happening everywhere. As an example it has the Tories just about holding Hazel Grove - despite everything...
They also have the Tories winning Westmorland and Lonsdale by 1% over the LDs, which is of course currently a LD seat with Tim Farron as MP. Boundary changes must have made the seat more Tory.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I remember it well.
The Conservatives are going to do atrociously. However, what I'm arguing for is that a narrative may develop that mitigates against a complete wipeout.
It's interesting to see how many people on here feel threatened by that.
I've had the carrot of a monumental Tory wipeout dangled in front of me for a while now. I *will* be disappointed to have that taken away from me.
I don't have a problem admitting that. I've found the period of Conservative government from 2010 increasingly difficult and so the greater their defeat the greater the cathartic benefit for me.
Well, in that case perhaps you need to grow up?
I remember being "disappointed" didn't go below 200 MPs on the night of GE2019. I was rightly called out on it then by a Labour supporter for childishness, and you need to be so now as well.
This isn't football. Nor is it an amusing drama for your entertainment. The country needs an effective opposition for democratic representation and good governance.
You need to control your emotions better.
An effective opposition is not a batshit party led by Priti Patel. If the Conservative Party wants to come back and have a go then great. But as it has gone away and been replaced by people suffering foaming dog fever, you can't demand their survival on the grounds of "Good governance"...
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
The big choppers thing is cultural.
A big chopper doesn't indicate a greater ability to score food in competition with other men, a greater likelihood of producing healthy offspring, or a greater propensity for sticking around to protect offspring and their mother.
With big tits it's a bit different. They don't produce more milk. (What makes them big is fat, not milk glands.) But on average they do indicate greater fertility.
Let's analogise the Cass review to a different demographic.
Imagine that a review of women's reproductive healthcare took place (with a focus on abortion), and the response from most women was one of shock and horror at the reviews methodology, findings and conclusions. Imagine that the review overwhelmingly cited anti-abortion activists, and ignored or downgraded the significance of multiple studies that talked about the medical reality of abortions. Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions. Imagine that women's advocacy groups, doctors and charities made multiple public statements about how this review is clearly biased and not in line with the scientific evidence. And imagine that despite all this, the politics surrounding the review have been lead by political parties and activists and a media climate that has stoked anti-abortion narratives for years and years.
That is what this review is. It is a political hatchet job. Politicians and journalists in the UK are happy with the outcomes, but doctors who specialise in this area and the people it will effect are not.
That's now what the review is. I am still reading it. One can, I'm sure, disagree with it, but it is misleading to exaggerate as you are now doing.
For example, you suggest, "Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions." The Cass review has not acted anything like that. They spoke extensively to trans young people, they spoke to trans adults, they spoke to parents of trans young people, they spoke to medical practitioners in this area.
Don't make shit up, 148grss.
One senses you are seeing the light this morning. Good to see.
Don't worry, we're (well, I - but I suspect also bondegezou ) are equally happy to tackle anyone who'd like to post that the Cass Review proves that the GIDS was a centre of unmitigated evil, that puberty blockers and x-sex hormones are never appropriate and that the evidence gathering excluded everyone on the more gender-critical side of the debate.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
The theory is that lesbians who don’t want sex with “men with penises who claim to be women” are transphobic. Given that this is 99.3% of lesbians it makes all lesbians transphobic. Lesbianism is essentially nullified
Now you're at it too.
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
"doesn't incorporate ... tactical voting" is quite an important point to note.
Given that one party is extremely unpopular, I would expect tactical voting against that party to be strong.
I think this inevitable defeat is probably the highest point the Tories may achieve. Far from swingback, I think the voters are likely to increase their determination that the Tories should be stampeded by a thousand incontinent steers and the surviving fragments used as pig swill.
One thing I have heard that is being reported back from the focus groups is that whilst there is a desire to kick out the Tories there is no desire to give Starmer a massive/landslide majority which helps the Tories to some extent.
If the polls roughly where they are now, I'd expect some very reluctant Tories to vote Tory.
If enough very reluctant Tories vote Tory they get a Conservative majority Government.
Not really. This is about getting from 22-24% to 30-32%.
A majority government isn't on the cards - nowhere close. We all know that.
So do you.
You are younger than me, you won't remember Friday 10th April 1992. The Conservatives might only get mid 30s, however if their vote is efficient they get loads more seats than you are expecting.
I do hope that other Conservatives share your expectation that Sunak will massively defy the odds and will continue to act accordingly by heading off any challenge to his leadership until it's too late.
I have some very unusual views on social equality and egalitarianism for a Conservative.
Politicians from all parties calling for a separate Scottish review after the #CassReport are guilty of the most fatuous Scottish exceptionalism. Just how do they suppose it would improve upon this detailed years long process led by a senior clinician?
Both Labour and the SNP have behaved poorly to some of their courageous and principled women MPs who trod a lonely path for years, pointing out what since Class has said it all of a sudden seems obvious to their Front Benches.
I am desperate for Scotland to take the lessons of Cass and apply them promptly. Another review, no doubt lasting several years as well given the complexities of the subject, is really not the answer.
As @Foxy has pointed out, these lessons are not nearly as blunt or clear cut as some have taken from the report but they do show a clear, evidence based way ahead and we need that now, not in the 2030s.
The Cass review is embarrassing as it shows what happens when you ignore science and go with gut feeling. Even nuclear scientists can be swayed by it. Fred Hoyle a very famous nuclear scientist and committed atheist, was wedded to there being no big bang. The 'father' of the Big Bang was a Belgian priest.
I have been reading the Cass review. It is damning in its analysis that practice was not supported by evidence. That said, I suspect there are other areas of medicine where this is true, but, as the Cass review also highlights, gender identity is uniquely caught up in a polarised societal debate.
Cass is damning that practice is not evidence led. She repeats that again and again.
The accusation against Cass there is substantial evidence to support the benefits of a lot of these practices but she chose to ignore that evidence. The problem is her report isn't evidence led.
A different problem with the report may be she didn't talk to or survey the children and parents who used these services. You might think the views of those she aims to protect to be important.
Hilary Cass has no expertise in gender issues in children to draw on. It would be easy to go off track when she has what seems very little information to work with.
One of the major telling things for the Cass Review is how many medical orgs have distanced themselves from its findings, and how many other nations have openly said "this is a bad review, and we have no intention of following it". There are a number of issues, whether it be the unnecessary high bar for studies to meet (if you try to give people who want puberty blockers / hormone treatment placebos - they will notice) or the ridiculous statements / citations of weirdos (the Cass Review cites some very strange Freudian psychology, as well as argues that toy preferences are somehow biological expressions of sex) that have made it too much of an obvious hatchet job. It's a shame that the UK political caste are just so brain poisoned with TERFdom that Labour is willing to agree to it anyway.
Also - I'm back from a long deserved holiday, so should be back to posting more regularly again.
To be fair to Cass there were some significant issues with the Tavistock clinic. Even if most of the treatments were appropriate and effective, the clinic has a duty of care that doesn't seem to have been met.
It's the wider conclusions that look suspect. Not talking to the patients and their parents to find out what went well and what what badly, and not consulting with practitioners in the field to understand what is current best practice and why they undertake the various treatments even if you ultimately reject those treatments seems like a massive fail.
Yeah - the Tavistock clinic wasn't great; but if you talk to patients there they would say that's due to unnecessary gate keeping and waiting, not that they were put on a fast track to medical interventions they didn't want. Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated - I could get testosterone blockers if I didn't want to see the effects of my male pattern baldness, and a woman going through the menopause could get HRT easily meeting with just the GP (or even over the counter). The pill has huge hormonal impacts on people - and many children (under 18s) take it all the time. For some reason it must be different for trans people, and that's because in the UK the ideological conclusion of most structures is to try to prevent as many people from transitioning as possible - even if those people want to and would benefit from it.
You write that, "Healthcare for trans people is unnecessarily segregated". One of the recommendations of the Cass review is to stop healthcare for trans people being segregated.
And that would be good - if it didn't also recommend not giving kids trans healthcare if they want and need it.
Do you accept that there are some people who want it but don't need it?
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
So why then are you falling in with an ideology that polices gender expression to the extent of encouraging people to surgically modify their body to fit the gender stereotype of the behaviours they wish to express?
It's bafflingly reactionary.
Which then raises the following questions.
Question 1: A man wishes to alter his body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent him?
Allow him but do not facilitate him?
Encourage him?
Followed by
Question 2:A woman wishes to alter her body to fit a female gender stereotype. Do you
Prevent her?
Allow her but do not facilitate her?
Encourage her?
People should have bodily autonomy. I believe in allowing people to make mistakes.
But if, for example, large numbers of women are having unnecessary breast implants to fit a patriarchal Ideal, then we should think about what we can change - with regulations on advertising, etc - to reduce the societal pressure that creates the feelings in people that they think they need to do that to fit in.
If I believe that people who are anorexic, or who are having needless cosmetic surgery (inc, dsay penis enlargement), are victims of a sexist society, then I find it hard to reconcile that with encouraging people to have major surgery to change their genitalia because society has made them feel uncomfortable in their own body.
People's bodies are not wrong (unless, they actually are wrong because a bone is broken, or their kidney doesn't work). Mostly people's bodies just are.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article on state control of the body...
(As to your point about breast size or penis size, I think that's not about societal imposition but Darwinian competition. Men compete with other men for female attention, so penis enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large penises are selected for. Women compete with other women so breast enlargement surgery is inevitable as long as large breasts are selected for)
The big choppers thing is cultural.
A big chopper doesn't indicate a greater ability to score food in competition with other men, a greater likelihood of producing healthy offspring, or a greater propensity for sticking around to protect offspring and their mother.
With big tits it's a bit different. They don't produce more milk. (What makes them big is fat, not milk glands.) But on average they do indicate greater fertility.
No it’s not. A bigger penis (girth is possibly more important than length) is known to give greater sexual pleasure. Women like them for a practical, physical reason. Its not “cultural”
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
For the same reason there was a massive push back against gay rights in the 70s and 80s, and there have been backlashes to the various waves of feminism; because we still live in a society that is deeply underpinned by patriarchy and misogyny and the acceptance of trans people would be another blow to that. The very existence of women who had the "option" of staying men and prefer womanhood creates a problem for patriarchal beliefs of what men and women should be. The very idea that men could have wombs and not use them to reproduce is, similarly, a threat. It's why many anti-trans people fetishize the potential "loss of fertility" or "breasts" when it comes to transmen - because they too reduce people they see as women to their ability to reproduce.
As female emancipation and gay liberation before were claimed to be "attacks on the roots of the family" - transgender people have become the new boogeypeople for the same arguments because society has, in some ways, progressed enough that they can't say that anymore about other queer people and women in general (although notice how many of the most prominent activists do say those things when people aren't scrutinising them as closely). The activists who are going after Gillick competence for trans healthcare also don't like abortion or the pill - and are backed by evangelical freaks who also want to end those things too. Many anti-trans people still hold ridiculous stereotypes about all queer people - rehashing the old "gays are groomers and recruiters" from the 60s. Hell, even when talking about women the loudest anti-trans voices (the Jordan Petersons, Steven Crowders and Matt Walshs) dislike things like no fault divorce and women in the workplace. It's all reactionary bullshit.
I think you’re picking on the extreme elements . The vast majority of the UK public are very accepting . You can be very liberal and still think “enough already” with the media’s obsession on the trans issue .
As the Scottish poll shows hardly anyone is going to vote on trans issues , and most people just really don’t care enough about it . It’s not being anti-trans to just not be that interested in it.
But as you note - transgender issues are the defining issue for many in the political and media class in the UK and US, and the right wing parties in the UK. I agree that most people have a general "live and let live" attitude towards queer people nowadays, but the thing is when you have concerted campaigns by the press and political reactionaries to drag this topic into the spotlight it becomes a big deal. In the Us it is clear why - the anti LGBTQ+ groups have basically said as much in public; they lost on equal marriage (both in the courts and with public opinion) and so wanted to find another wedge issue to try and hurt queer people. Bathrooms didn't stick at first, so they started harping on about sports and then, as all moral panics do, they went full "they're trying to devour our children".
Rubbish.
Most of the political and media classes retreated behind platitudes of TWAW and “be kind”, ignoring the campaign of vilification persecuted by Stonewall et al who drove two professors and a Barrister out of their jobs (all left wing Lesbians as it happens) for daring to stand up for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2018 a group tried to circulate information to schools suggesting puberty blockers weren’t completely harmless and reversible, advocating “watchful waiting” - six years ahead of Cass, but no, there was to be “No Debate” and an un-evidenced medical procedure was pursued on vulnerable, frequently autistic or gay children.
It’s a scandal for the ages. And attempting to present the toxicity as “both sides” is ludicrous. That’s not what the employment tribunals are saying.
Puberty blockers are indeed reversible - we know this because they are used for cis children who have precocious puberty and then go on to have puberty at a time more in line with their peers. Basically all healthcare for trans people is just refitted healthcare for cis people - HRT is used for women who have menopause or other hormonal issues, puberty blockers are mostly used for precocious puberty, etc. etc.
More rubbish. Puberty blockers used for treatment of precocious puberty are stopped and puberty then happens. What’s being done here is blocking puberty altogether - when going through puberty can help ameliorate gender distress.
Here’s another report the Cass review didn’t consider - but the TRAs are not complaining about this omission, curiously:
A new Mayo Clinic study of samples from the testes of natal boys taking puberty blockers for gender dysphoria found evidence of "mild-to-severe" testicular atrophy. The authors wrote: "This combined with...abnormalities from the histology data raise a potential concern regarding the complete ’reversibility’" of puberty blockers and the "reproductive fitness" of such children. The authors published their study as a pre-print; it hasn't been peer reviewed.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
Why do they claim that?
Again - I have literally never seen this as a queer activist. I have seen anti-trans people claim this. I have seen discourse where anti-trans cis lesbians try to base their bigotry against transwomen on this basis by falsely claiming transwomen are trying to force them to have sex with them. I have seen anti-trans activists putting out stickers that reinforce this narrative. I've heard discourse that has a similar conclusion with the term bisexual (because that implies binary gender) but even that was quickly discarded because a) most bisexual people were happy to include trans and nonbinary people in the people they are attracted to and b) it wasn't good faith discourse. Just as this isn't good faith discourse either. Because if this were true the only "moral" sexuality would be pansexuality - and you seem to think this is applied to lesbianism but not male homosexuality - despite transmen being a thing.
I still don't understand why, of all the political and cultural topics out there, for some people - including on here - trans has become THE defining issue, almost to the exclusion of all others.
I can sort of understand some people having tunnel vision over Israel-Palestine, or immigration, or Brexit, or even Currygate and Angela Rayner's house. But trans? It's so niche yet so salient. Our equivalent of American obsessing over abortion only several orders of magnitude more niche.
It's not niche. It's being rammed down everyone's throats. The state has been literally flying transsexual-themed flags from public buildings for years. I can't walk down my local high street without seeing about 20 of those flags. They are indoctrinating state school pupils into this psycho kook muck. People are being sacked from their jobs for calling shit shit - or even just for saying no, they won't play along with it, they won't call a big bloke in a dress "she", and they won't say that men can have wombs and get pregnant. Why is the state doing this - that should be the question.
The answer is to do with the cull that's coming, one way or another. It didn't have to be "trans". It could have been something else.
It's niche
It should be. But it isn't. Since about 2012, what was rightly a very very niche issue, which nobody really needed to worry about because it affected almost nobody - has been, as Donkeys says, rammed down everybody's throats. Go and look around a high school library and see what proportion of the books in there deal with issues of gender and sexuality - what - 25% or so? Every school now has kids who think they are the opposite sex to the one they were born, or one of the others. There has been a weird campaign to get kids to change sex. If you don't have kids, I accept it can seem very niche. But if you do, it is weirdly mainstream.
Do I need to pull out the left handed people graph?
The answer is simple - as the grip of patriarchal and misogynist norms weakens, more people will be willing to admit they're a bit gay / bi or that they don't really feel like the gender they were assigned and might prefer body modifications to show that.
Have the lesbians and gays been out recruiting more? Are bisexuals going into schools and waving the flag to make more kids accept there may be one or two people of the same gender they might be attracted to? No. As it became more acceptable to be openly queer, as fewer and fewer people punished people for being openly queer, as the stigma has lessened more people are willing to say "yeah, I might be fruity". That's good.
Whilst I agree with what you have written here it seems to me you have either accidently or purposefully switched the debate. Cookie's comment did not primarily concern sexuality, it concerned gender.
Gender and sexuality, and the policing of both, are inherently intertwined. Being gay has had associations of being "unmanly" of being effeminate, of not being a real man - as lesbianism has had associations of being masculine, and of not being a real woman. Queer rights have always included criticism and queering of gender norms and roles - so the normalisation of queer sexualities inherently normalises queer gender expression.
Except my daughter- who is a lesbian - is being told she should not regard herself as gay and that by 'clinging to such outmoded concepts' she is showing hersrlf to be anti-Trans. There is open hostility being displayed to those who regard themselves as being gay rather than embracing some form of gender fluidity.
There is just as much extremism within the Trans community as there is in amongst anti-Trans.
I mean if she is denying that trans women are women, then yes - she would be by definition be being anti-trans. And again, I am queer and have loads of cis gay and lesbian friends, as well as trans queer friends. Nobody has an issue with cis gay / lesbian people being gay / lesbian - its the knee jerk bigotry that people dislike. That is actually rarer amongst cis queer people than cis straight people (indeed, cis lesbians are the most supportive of trans people out of any cis group by gender and sexuality).
She is denyig nothing. Like many young people these days she just wants to get on with herlife on alive and let live basis. It is she and her partner who are specificaly being targeted at university by Trans extremists. Your apparent denial that this even exists is very telling.
So, apropos of nothing, queer people decided that your lesbian daughter and her partner are awful people just for being cis lesbians? Yeah - I don't believe that because it's ludicrous.
Which is why you are one of the extremists in this debate. Your 'side' can do no wrong whilst anyone who raises concerns about some aspects of the changing world is a reactionary and bigot.
As I said, your position is very telling.
Your claim is that queer communities are harassing cis lesbians for no reason other than they are cis lesbians? This isn't about sides - this is about plausibility. It seems incongruous from all the data points I have (being an active member of the queer community in and around London and knowing loads of cis lesbians and other queer people) that cis lesbians would be being harassed from within the queer community just for being cis lesbian. Like - I don't even really know what you are claiming? Did other queer people assume (correctly) that your daughter and her partner were cis lesbians and just start harassing them because of it?
There is a section of the Trans Community - particularly seen in the university environment - that claims that lesbianism is no longer applicable in the new Trans world view of things. That you would deny that this is possible seems particlarly perverse (in the non sexual sense of the word) on your part because we all know that extremist views exist in every walk of life, gay, straight or trans.
All movements seeking social acceptance for a new idea have their daft fringes.
Consider the women's suffragists and the suffragettes; the tactics and some if the arguments of the fringe set back their cause - but it didn't invalidate the fundamental argument.
Comments
Stop looking at tweets by people who aren't familiar with systematic reviewing methods and look at what the actual report and published papers say.
Yes - and that includes the ability to modify their body for their comfort or even joy if they so wish.
Various people have been using electric vehicles as cabs for over a decade. There are some very high mileage battery packs out there. For good, water cooled designs, combined with moderately intelligent charging software there is strong evidence of longevity.
2) Whilst true and speaks well of you, the point was that in a Darwinian situation people compete with other people for advantages: Cats compete with other cats to avoid the dogs, dogs compete with other dogs to prey on the cats. Your wife's happiness depended on there being enough Lost_Passwords to find her, so the numbers converge.
clinical help and advice in deciding how to support a child with gender incongruence", not that it should not be done without clinical oversight. Getting advice from someone (hopefully) without a strong agenda seems to make more sense that relying on the web which will probably give a strong push one way or the other (Mermaids: DO IT!; Genspect: DON'T DO IT)
I may be missing something stronger on it elsewhere in the review.
Medical interventions are not inherently bad. If people need medicine to live, they should have it.
At around £300 pa for testosterone, and given the relatively small size of the market, I doubt "big pharma" is particularly interested.
If you're lobbying to restrict the supply, should I say that you're doing the bidding of black marketeers ?
What nobody has explored in-depth so far is Truss's claim that she was forced to reverse the cancellation of the CT raise, a relatively low cost measure, and one that would have maintained the status quo, but no attempt was made to get her to reverse or alter the bigger stuff like the energy support package.
I can absolutely believe this to be true, because America has had a long term campaign to repatriate US businesses by forcing other nations into raising their CT levels. Biden himself intervened in the minibudget debate, so clearly the US was very much involved and would have taken the opportunity to apply pressure.
I am just curious as to the form this 'force' took. I know that Truss received a letter from Simon Case demanding that she change course or the UK wouldn't be able to service its debt - perhaps he was explicit in his letter that it was the CT freeze that had to go.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/16/britain-intervening-war-gaza-defend-israel-against-iran
One thing, I'd make it a strong recommendation to freeze gametes prior to transitioning, as fertility can (probably will) be irreparably damaged certainly for biological males and kids are likely to be very low on the agenda for a say 19 yr old transitioning but something people can and do change their minds about later
https://x.com/richardpbacon/status/1780128420472451153?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Bless her. For an ex-PM, that is heroically tiny
The key paradox is how dare you police my gender vs you can't come into this space because it is safe.
I am not 100% clear in my mind why trans isn't just the new gay (which @148grss is essentially saying) because all kinds of objections are thrown up against trans people which were almost word for word used about homosexuality. I have no idea what we will consider, in 50 years time, a woman to be. The answer to the "new gay" question has only been answered, incompletely imo, by saying that being gay is something that you feel and can be with no external elements, whereas to be trans you "need" medical procedures. Puberty blockers, breast binding, mastectomies and all the other medical procedures that I am not going to cite in advance of my lunch. You can't just wake up and "be trans" because you need the paraphernalia of medical treatments and whatnot.
That said, I don't see how therapy for evidently deeply troubled children is a bad thing or is "conversion therapy". People have therapy for just about anything and this to me qualifies as a very good thing to have therapy about.
All I took from the Cass Interim Review (haven't yet read the full review) is that GIDS ignored the many other issues that their adolescent patients were suffering from and focused only on and treated the gender dysphoria.
My instinct is that any medical procedure for children should not be the first line of defence. I get that for some medication is important to "survive" but I would say that therapy can be as effective.
A friend's mother, who was very depressed some years ago, had ECT. The doctors at the time said that it was like banging the TV if it didn't work. They didn't really know what it did to the brain but it would shake everything up (literally) and when the pieces came down again there was a chance that the person would feel differently.
It is considered good practice to involve younger children in decision making, even below age 10, although you are putting less weight on the child's view as they get younger. The General Medical Council guidance says, "You should involve children and young people as much as possible in decisions about their care, even when they are not able to make decisions on their own."
An anorexic feels uncomfortable in their body. Is there a problem with their body? Should we provide them with "affirming care" and prescribe them with appetite suppressants?
The trans arguments are completely bewildering to me. I've grown up with decades of arguments from feminists fighting for the right to own their bodies and not to have society tell them that their bodies are wrong and they need to do this or that to them to make them ready for the beach and male approval. And now it looks like so-called progressives are throwing that all away for the sake of an ideology that tells people that they are right to feel that their body is wrong.
Can you not see that the trans ideology is actually not progressive, that it is reactionary bullshit that tells people their problems are to do with defects in themselves, and not a result of the ways in which society is mistreating them? It's about placing the onus on individuals to change themselves to fit society, instead of changing society to fit individuals.
But yes you can. Some aspirin, nurofen, cough mixture. Then there are some behind the counter. And then there are some that are only administered in extremis. I think morphine falls into this last category. So you are proving my point for me.
(I have also not read it in full - I've skimmed the summaries on the main issues)
https://www.caltonathleticrecoverygroup.com/
It doesn’t work because it is an Anti-ABM system.
And it is immoral because it stops rocket attacks - preventing the Palestinians striking back.
They also bang on about Arrow.
*Started in the 70s. It’s a creed that all missile defence can’t work, mustn’t work and would destroy the would have it did work. Which it doesn’t.
It's not unknown for those providing clinical oversight to have their own agendas, either.
Anecdotally, those in the NHS my son came across were either neutral but challenging, or actively hostile.
It's blimmin' complicated, is what it is.
Nice point about the anorexics.
https://x.com/babybeginner/status/1780141117763399958
You think - correct me if wrong - trans behavior is externally imposed and should be prevented/dissuaded. I think people do weird stuff because they're people and should be neither prevented nor encouraged. I understand your position (I think?), but mine is different.
Trans affirming healthcare is in no way conflicting with the idea that women need not feel their body should cater to patriarchal ideals of femininity. Indeed - it is the fact that trans affirming healthcare leads to this outcome (women who men perceive as women but may have a penis) that it is hated; because patriarchy demands that "men" should not ever feel a preference to be a woman, and that "women" should be there for the male gaze and not themselves. You need only look at those who constantly scream "look at what they took from us" when discussing Elliot Page's transition to see that many men hate transition specifically because it calls into question that "female" bodies belong to them. Transitioning is not about making people fit to society - which should be clear when the power centres of society that typically enforce patriarchal norms are the same ones arguing against transitioning. Butler is very good at explaining this - you should listen to some of their recent interviews ahead of their new book coming out.
Re the delays, well - quite. But it is the place of the Review to recommend what should be and not be entirely constrained by what is. Everybody should be able to see, in a timely manner, someone who can talk them through the various options, explore other explanations for the symptoms and summarise - as far as possible - the evidence for and against various pathways.
That seems to be the difference between taking them for treatment of precocious puberty and to prevent puberty happening at all.
And on that uncontroversial point, back to work.
For example, you suggest, "Imagine this review was conducted by a man, and spoke only to male doctors, or a few women who were active anti-abortion activists who regretted their abortions." The Cass review has not acted anything like that. They spoke extensively to trans young people, they spoke to trans adults, they spoke to parents of trans young people, they spoke to medical practitioners in this area.
Don't make shit up, 148grss.
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2024/04/10/bjsports-2023-108029
"Britain has no business intervening in the war in Gaza. So why did it defend Israel against Iran?"
Simon Jenkins
Get that title and also the first sentence:
"Britain’s use of its air force to defend Israel against Iran at the weekend was an emphatic intervention in the war in Gaza."
His answer is that British policy under foreign secretary David Cameron is predicated on the idea that Britain should play the role of world policeman.
That is actually crap. As Jenkins himself points out, Britain hasn't protected Ukraine in the same way it's protected Israel. One could also cite about a million other occasions since the days of the Mau Mau when there's been trouble among the fuzzy-wuzzies and the rodbacked poshies haven't had a signal from the US to send in the gunboats. He asks a good question, though.
I reckon there's disquiet at the FCO.
1. As any fule kno, the FCO has many Arab friends and some at the FCO have jolly sincere respect for Arabic-speaking oriental types from former British possessions or stomping grounds who are sitting on huge mounds of money that they love to splash about. They sincerely wish to be liked by their friends, just as everyone does. (Who would bail out Barclays next time, otherwise?)
2. See the reports of which Israeli sites were targeted. Many mention the Nevatim airbase in the Negev plus a second target in the Negev. Some say two sites: Nevatim and Mount Hermon. Well Mount Hermon can't be the second site in the Negev because it's nowhere near the Negev. It's close to the tripoint where unoccupied Lebanon and unoccupied Syria meet the Israeli-occupied Golan. Hmmmmm...... A site that comes to mind in the Negev that isn't Nevatim is of course the nuclear place at Dimona. Whichever way you look at it, the foreign ministers of the world's great powers will be interested in what may or may not happen at Dimona for obvious reasons.
3. Don't forget that on the very same day (1 April) that Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus they also murdered aid workers in Gaza, including British citizens - British former service personnel, in fact, who were in Gaza playing a security role, including one guy who is known to have served in the SBS - all stabbed in the back by the IDF.
4. Although Jenkins may be channelling disquiet, he's probably mostly functioning as a safety valve. If he really wanted to fuck shit up, he'd call on Sunak and Cameron to publish all the details of Britain's defence treaty with Israel. Then at least we might learn what military treaty commitments towards Israel Britain actually has, and what Britain gets in return.
- Young people who had been referred to the Tavistock
- The parents of young people who had been referred to the Tavistock
- Clinicians currently and formerly at the Tavistock
That being in addition to the direct contact the Review team had with such people.ETA: Appendix 3 of the report has the summary of the qualitative research.
ETA2: It's astonishing how many people are making claims that are easily disproved by even a cursory skim of the Review.
I would like to see the Conservative Party jettison the extremists and come back as a centre-right one nation edition. Hopefully too, the latest Farage electoral vehicle will wither and die. I also hope any future Conservative Party allow him and his fellow travellers nowhere near them.
The crazy version is people saying Iron Dome doesn’t hit anything - while we watch video of rockets not landing on the ground because they’ve been blown up. By being hit by interceptors. Also on video.
I remember being "disappointed" didn't go below 200 MPs on the night of GE2019. I was rightly called out on it then by a Labour supporter for childishness, and you need to be so now as well.
This isn't football. Nor is it an amusing drama for your entertainment. The country needs an effective opposition for democratic representation and good governance.
You need to control your emotions better.
The report is, of course, likely to exacerbate delays (as the Leeds NHS site noted), and pressures on funding aren't likely to see much improvement - probably the reverse.
I think the more dangerous part of his argument is that the UK has no right playing the world policeman. On our own that is self-evidently true but is it a bad thing for us (along with France and, more covertly, other counties), to assist the world's actual policeman, the United States, in keeping order? I don't think so. If Iron dome had failed thousands of people now alive would have died. How on earth is that not a good thing?
I thought Street was popular in the West Midlands . They also published a GE voter intention poll for the region which was horrific for the Tories .
I miss XL Bully chat. Those were the good old days on PB. When we’d discuss the latest mauling, post videos of kids being brutally chewed up, gossip about potential face transplants for ravaged victims. Now it’s trans trans trans trans trans trans
*citation needed
**citation needed, if it wasn't clearly bollocks - I remember an article suggesting the about 60cm of fat could stop a 9mm bullet, which is maybe fine if you're very fat and your assailant obliging fires at the fattiest part
Having fallen asleep (allegedly) in Court, Mr Trump is now known as "Don Snorleone".
Small things.
And there is not even a contractual condition that you have to be in the virtual stocks for so many hours a week for people to scream abuse at. That may be implied though.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/nhs-cant-find-consultant-lead-32581408
Politicians from all parties calling for a separate Scottish review after the #CassReport are guilty of the most fatuous Scottish exceptionalism. Just how do they suppose it would improve upon this detailed years long process led by a senior clinician?
https://x.com/joannaccherry/status/1780176712673714311
Both Labour and the SNP have behaved poorly to some of their courageous and principled women MPs who trod a lonely path for years, pointing out what since Class has said it all of a sudden seems obvious to their Front Benches.
Like 148grss my daughter has Trans friends who do not try to undermine her own lived experience or sexuality. My point was that there are extremists who do.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Judgement-R-v-Michaela-Community-Schools-Trust.pdf
This is very obviously a 'who is in charge of the discourse' bit of litigation as no-one is going to mention the obvious truth that actual, as opposed to performative, prayer thankfully can be neither compelled nor forbidden, being as it is a disposition of the heart and mind. (See Jesus and all the spiritual greats passim).
Long suffering pupils might want to reflect on the Benedictine tradition of 'laborare est orare' which roughly translates for schoolchildren: Prayer is double physics.
A big chopper doesn't indicate a greater ability to score food in competition with other men, a greater likelihood of producing healthy offspring, or a greater propensity for sticking around to protect offspring and their mother.
With big tits it's a bit different. They don't produce more milk. (What makes them big is fat, not milk glands.) But on average they do indicate greater fertility.
PS Why do you say penis enlargement surgery anyway? https://www.google.com/search?q=jelqing
And so am I. Damn. Like the person who replies to an accidental reply-all email telling someone to stop replying-all, and replies all.
As @Foxy has pointed out, these lessons are not nearly as blunt or clear cut as some have taken from the report but they do show a clear, evidence based way ahead and we need that now, not in the 2030s.
Here’s another report the Cass review didn’t consider - but the TRAs are not complaining about this omission, curiously:
A new Mayo Clinic study of samples from the testes of natal boys taking puberty blockers for gender dysphoria found evidence of "mild-to-severe" testicular atrophy. The authors wrote: "This combined with...abnormalities from the histology data raise a potential concern regarding the complete ’reversibility’" of puberty blockers and the "reproductive fitness" of such children. The authors published their study as a pre-print; it hasn't been peer reviewed.
https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/1776112773279134031?
Consider the women's suffragists and the suffragettes; the tactics and some if the arguments of the fringe set back their cause - but it didn't invalidate the fundamental argument.