Yes, Europe Is Restricting “Gender-Affirming Care”

[MrFanti]

https://www.city-journal.org/article...affirming-care

Interesting...

[Stavros]

https://www.city-journal.org/article...affirming-care

Interesting...

The article concludes by affirming that so far nobody has produced a firm conclusion:

"A good case can be made that Republicans who seek to ban these interventions entirely are being more faithful to the findings of the European evidence reviews. The real debate between red states in the U.S. and European health authorities is not about whether there is good evidence for pediatric gender transition. There isn’t. Rather, the debate is about whether children as young as eight with a strong desire for “gender affirming” drugs have the ability to understand fully and give informed consent to the long-term consequences of these interventions—and even if they can, whether this justifies enlisting them in an uncontrolled medical experiment."

If people agree that someone under the age of 16, or 10 can not have, and should not have the right to make decisions about their condition, where does this leave the subject? If it is the case that a child is in distress because they believe they have been born in the wrong body, this distress needs to be dealt with, for why would a parent or guardian want their child to live in distress, given the impact it can have on mental health, physical health and just the ability to get through the day?

In other words, if puberty blockers are to be denied to someone under the age of 16, what therapy is to replace it?

These issues have been dealt with in a documentary, The Clinic, aired in the UK on ITVX this week (see link below). I don't know if it is available outside the UK, and it is not (yet) on YouTube where there are other films on the Tavistock Clinic, some of which I think should be treated with caution, especially if Douglas Murray is involved.

What The Clinic does is to lay bare the strengths and weaknesses of the current debate: it offers the testimony of a teenager (M2F) for whom Puberty Blockers have been a crucial, and positive component in her overall health, and another teenager (F2M) for whom the treatment amounted to a form of mutilation, in other words, it was the wrong course of therapy for the patient.

This brings us to the core problem: how advanced is the medical treatment of 'Gender Dysphoria' if that is the term that must be used. Does the Dutch Protocol, which is often cited as the origin of 'affirmative' care, have robust intellectual and clinical credentials or was it experimental from the start and risky for that reason?

It became clear in The Clinic, that there may be a problem at the diagnostic level. In the critical court case in London, when Tavistock Clinic clinicians were asked how many patients had been diagnosed with Autism, they could not answer because they did not know, not having explored what is known as the 'co-morbidity' issue in Gender Dysphoria. The F2M teenager implied that the origins of GD lay in a childhood trauma, rather than say, as was the case with the M2F teenager, an absolute conviction from the earliest age that she was born in the wrong body. Is it possible that a young girl being abused by her father would think 'If I was a boy, he would not abuse me' -thus establishing gender anxiety as a response to abuse, rather than being for want of a better word, a 'natural' feeling?

This became important in The Clinic, because one of the nursing staff felt that 4 consultations was insufficient to begin hormonal treatment, that not enough time was being spent exploring the causes of gender anxiety, and I think this is one of the main shortcomings in the clinical process. Moreover, because gender medicine is not as advanced as, say, cancer medicine, the long term implications of medical treatments are not known, while the record shows that the proportion of people in adult life who have undergone SRS and are happy with it appears to be strong, but the data base is limited. And, crucially, it does not deal with the failures. The tragedy of the F2M teenager is that the care and after-care for De-Transitioning for teenagers appears to be non-existent. I don't think this is a problem limited to the NHS in the UK, I suspect that Gender care is underfunded, and understaffed in most countries.

Lastly, the most obvious worm in this hole, is politics. One of the parents who defends her child and became involved in Mermaids insists that their activism is generated by the needs of their children. For those who argue all gender care has become 'affirmative' care, also claim that clinicians were and are put under intense pressure because they have been -'captured' is the word used in the film- by activists. One cannot discount the impact of lobbying on policy makers, it happens in most industries, but is it the case that Trans Activism has become an either/or, binary political campaign in which someone is either in favour of Trans Rights for all ages, or Opposed to it -that one is either trans friendly, or trans-phobic?

To me, this marks a deterioration of a deeply sensitive issue, one that requires substantially more data and experience before any definitive conclusion can be reached, if it ever can be. After all, if some people argue that vaccinations against disease, against viral outbreaks cause more problems than they solve, it is as if Jenner never lived, and our intellectual competence to decide has not advanced since the 18th century.

What we left with when Puberty Blockers are denied, is an outcome that suits politicians and policy makers and activists who don't understand, and don't want to understand what Gender Anxiety is, and are even less interested in what therapy the child should receive. For them, Gender Anxiety is just a phase children go through, just as a 9 year old insists he or she wants to be a train driver or an astronaut when they grow up; who wants to play the guitar at 10, and be a boxer at 11. This trivialises an issue that in reality for some children is literally a life or death challenge.

We owe it to our fellow citizens to at least try and understand, and offer the best therapy that we can provide, while always learning how to advance.