If the purpose of the UK government website, ‘Apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate’ is to put people off by its complexity, it will have succeeded. It starts with an ‘Overview’ where one is informed: Apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate if you want your affirmed gender (sometimes called an ‘acquired gender’) to be legally recognised in [...]
An open letter of 17 December 2021 by the editors of The British Medical Journal, or 'The BMJ' as they call this august organ, has just come to my attention. It’s addressed to the man who runs the social medium formerly called BookFace but which is now styled merely as ‘Meta’. The new title, a Greek prefix meaning [...]
The title of this post is borrowed from a book published in 1967 by a doctor with the splendidly appropriate name of Alex Comfort. It deals with how doctors in the past and in the then present, inadvertently and ignorantly made people anxious, particularly over masturbation and constipation, among other matters in which they had set themselves up [...]
To talk of mental illness implies there is a corresponding state of mental health, but what is mental health? A common definition is ‘emotional, psychological, and social well-being’ but this is a tautology because ‘well-being’ is the same as ‘health’. It’s like saying mental health is mental health. The World Health Organization defines mental health as: ‘A state [...]
In the application form for a British passport you’re asked to state your gender by putting a cross in one of two boxes. These are labeled ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ so that’s clear enough. ‘Gender’ here is a synonym or euphemism for sex, otherwise it could lead to misunderstanding. Sex? Yes please! Or it might bring to mind [...]
Confused about your gender? Then you will need specialised gender care! Consider this scenario. A young boy wants to dress in girls’ clothes, play with girls’ toys, and expresses a liking for the colour pink. He says he is or wishes he could be a girl. His concerned parents wonder whether he has ‘gender dysphoria’ and take him [...]
When I was a medical student one of the subjects we had to become familiar with was called minor surgery. This meant learning how to sew up cuts, operate for ingrowing toenails, remove small skin cysts, and deal with similar problems. But it was impressed upon us that there is no such thing as minor surgery; there are [...]
Just when I thought the ‘transitioning’ mania couldn’t get any worse, it has. As it is only to be expected, there are not a few people who, having undergone ‘transitioning’ to try to change their outward appearance to resemble that of the opposite sex, subsequently regret doing this. They are known as ‘detransitioners’. And some of these, we [...]
If one undertakes to write a regular column in a medical journal there may be occasions when the deadline is looming and one can’t think of anything to say, though with so much going on in the world these instances must be rare. However, if afflicted by writer’s block it is always possible to turn to a subject [...]
Early in my career for a time I worked for a doctor who was also a keen gardener, who gave me some sage advice about putting oneself in the patient’s shoes: ‘Never go to a doctor whose plants are dying!’ I’ll come back to that later. I like to think that I am an open minded person – [...]