I thought this thread was worth returning to in light of the Cass Report published this month, and the leaked files from WPATH (pdf link) last month. They're both pretty damning on the whole transgender care issue. WPATH are considered best practice in the area, despite having a significant composition of activists, a flagrant conflict of interests - the report says "WPATH is not a medical group", "WPATH is not a scientific group", "WPATH has misled the public", among others.
The immediate obvious outcome is a large-scale international rowing back on routine proscription of puberty blockers for kids identifying as trans - there's little in the way of any research into their effectiveness or side-effects, and it seems they may well lead to infertility and/or cancer down the line (these are unconfirmed links - but of course the point is they haven't been investigated in trials. And the infertility one obviously stands to reason). The WPATH files showed that kids clearly didn't understand the potential ramifications (with regards fertility in particular) of what they were being proscribed, but they were proscribed them anyway. Some of the medical procedures described are frankly nothing more than mutilation -
Quote:
Gender nullification surgeries, defined by WPATH as “procedures resulting in an absence of external primary sexual characteristics,” and bigenital surgeries, such as the creation of a pseudo-vagina cavity without amputating the penis, are the end result of activists overtaking WPATH [...] When Dr. Thomas Satterwhite, a renowned California surgeon, asks for the group’s input for “non-standard” procedures such as “top surgery without nipples, nullification, and phallus-preserving vaginoplasty,” no one raised any ethical questions about the destruction of perfectly healthy reproductive organs to fulfill customized body modification desires
It again emphasises a strong link between gender dysphoria and various pre-existing psychological issues (autism, depression, brain trauma, etc) -
Quote:
Numerous studies indicate that many adolescents experiencing adolescent-onset gender dysphoria suffer from multiple psychiatric comorbidities that pre-date the onset of distress about their sex. Detransitioner testimony supports the hypothesis that some mentally distressed people could be drawn to self-diagnosing as transgender after being led to believe that sex-trait modification procedures are a miracle cure for all their psychological suffering"
It refers to a "Transition or suicide myth" -
Quote:
But how much truth is there to the claim that genderaffirming care is “suicide prevention care”? The answer is very little [...] As indicated in surveys, transgender-identified youth are at elevated risk for suicidality and suicide.168 Crucially, however, completed suicide in this population is extremely rare, and elevated suicidality is most likely because of comorbid psychopathology, which is extremely common and independently linked to suicidal ideation and behavior. In short, there is no suicide epidemic striking transgenderidentified youth, and the claim that “gender” is the cause of and solution to this group’s suicidal tendencies is a classic mistaking of correlation for causation
The Cass Report finds this too -
Quote:
There are many reports that puberty blockers are beneficial in reducing mental distress and improving the wellbeing of children and young people with gender dysphoria, but as demonstrated by the systematic review the quality of these studies is poor.
The Review has heard that the widespread claims that puberty blockers reduce the risk of death by suicide in this population may place pressure on families to obtain private treatment.
The Review has also heard from GPs who have been put under pressure to continue prescribing such treatments on the basis that failing to do so will put young people at risk of suicide.
The University of York systematic review found no evidence that puberty blockers improve body image or dysphoria, and very limited evidence for positive mental health outcomes, which without a control group could be due to placebo effect or concomitant psychological support.
She more than once cites the toxicity of debate around the matter as unhelpful (we can see that with the way RAM tried to debate the matter earlier in thread actually, but more clearly on Twitter and even from organisations charged with trans care such as Stonewall) -
Quote:
The surrounding noise and increasingly toxic, ideological and polarised public debate has made the work of the Review significantly harder and does nothing to serve the children and young people who may already be subject to
significant minority stress.
It looks at the idea (which dahamsta posted here) that only 1-3% of transitioners express regret, let alone want to detransition -
Quote:
The current evidence base suggests that children who present with gender incongruence at a young age are most likely to desist before puberty, although for a small number the incongruence will persist.
[...]
Estimates of the percentage of individuals who embark on a medical pathway and subsequently have regrets or detransition are hard to determine from GDC clinic data alone. There are several reasons for this:
• those who do detransition may not choose to return to the gender clinic and are hence lost to follow-up
• the Review has heard from a number of clinicians working in adult gender services that the time to detransition ranges from 5-10 years, so follow-up intervals on studies on medical treatment are too short to capture this
• the inflection point for the increase in presentations to gender services for children and young people was 2014, so even studies with longer follow-up intervals will not capture the outcomes of this more recent cohort.
The quote "I felt like it wasn’t, you know, acceptable to go back. It wasn’t a thing to go back, you know. It wasn’t something that was talked about. It didn’t feel like an option that they wanted to discuss or even mention" is also pretty damning.
Her Appendix 4 lists the reasons why many clinics refused to co-operate with her study (not really surprising), and indeed tried to actively thwart it ("disappointingly, as will become clear in this report, attempts to improve the evidence base have been thwarted by a lack of cooperation from the adult gender services.") It's pretty much self-interested activist groups doing what they want with very little in the way of medical/scientific evidence which you'd want to expect from such a serious matter. Cass says "children have been "let down" by a failure to base gender care on evidence-based research."
This is becoming a medical scandal to outstrip cervical cancer, thalidomide and others. It'll be interesting to see where it goes next - you wouldn't bet against class action law suits, and you'd hope some of the people involved serve jail time.
And in their own small way, I think those who put their pronouns on their emails or are otherwise "inclusive" of this sort of stuff will have some small amount of blood on their hands too.
JK Rowling is playing an absolute stormer on Twitter at the moment too - what an unlikely hero in all of this. And the abuse she's taken for it has been horrific.
