GenderGP in Trouble Again

GenderGP is an organisation that encourages and provides abnormal hormonal treatment (‘affirmative care’) to so-called trans people. It’s hard to take it seriously, however, when we find this kind of writing on their website:

…patients whose gender identity differs from the one they were assigned at birth.

Neither gender identity, whatever that is, nor anything else, is ‘assigned’ at birth. Sex is determined at conception and recognised at birth as male or female.

In the Questions and Answers section of the website, written by the head of the organisation, Dr Helen Webberley, we find more surprising statements (slightly paraphrased):

How can someone so young be so sure they are trans? They started to realise that they were in some way different from other kids that look like them…this has been with them since they were born…By the time trans people are ready to ask for help, they are sure.

This is pure speculation. It’s based on the evidence-free notion that trans identity is inborn. But gender confusion, as we might call it, seems more likely due to adverse childhood experiences, the co-existence of mental disorders such as autism or depression, or the influence of social media. And what sort of help would they be asking for? To change their sex – an impossibility.

I once asked a young trans boy how he knew he was a boy? He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘How do you know you are a girl?’

Absurd. Dr Webberley and the ‘young trans boy’ both have female anatomy – obvious at a glance.

Ask a young trans person who is approaching puberty what they fear most and their answer is loud and clear: puberty. They know that puberty is going to change their body, making it unrecognisable over the next decade.

The body after puberty doesn’t become unrecognisable. It becomes the mature version of the male or female child’s body.

They know that the drastic changes of puberty that are about to happen are scary, irreversible, major body changes that will change their androgynous child self into a stereotypical male or female adult.

Children are not androgynous, meaning of indeterminate sex or having both male and female characteristics. A male or female child is clearly recognisable as such. And note the pointless pejorative descriptor, ‘stereotypical’. Perhaps she means ‘typical’. This whole overblown sentence should be re-written: ‘They know that puberty will change them into male or female adults.’ What’s so terrible about that?

Is it more drastic to allow a trans teenager to go through the irreversible changes of the ‘wrong’ puberty which will one day need to be put right through invasive surgery, or allowing them to stop the wrong puberty from progressing and instead correct it so that they can experience the ‘right’ puberty?

There is no such thing as the wrong puberty or the right puberty; there is only puberty.

If we do nothing the suffering continues, as puberty marches on unheeded, causing those irreversible changes and long-lasting damage.

Utter nonsense. On what grounds are the changes of puberty regarded as damaging?

Dr Webberley also draws a false comparison between treatment for physical disorders such as knee replacement in arthritis or prostate surgery, and ‘gender affirming’ treatment for gender dysphoria – a disorder, if you can call it such, that only exists in the mind of the person. Incidentally, the phrase ‘gender affirming’ really means sex denying.

That’s just the background. You can find out more about GenderGP in a previous blog I wrote, here.

Now to the current problem. A girl, referred to as ‘J’, was treated since the age of 15 with testosterone, because from around the age of 12 she had been ‘identifying’ as male. The fact that she had previously been diagnosed with autism and anorexia may well have had something to do with the situation, but this hadn’t stopped GenderGP from rushing ahead with abnormal sex hormone prescribing.

J’s father brought a case against GenderGP in the High Court in London, arguing that the treatment shouldn’t have been started without court approval. The judge agreed, saying, ‘There must be very significant concerns about the prospect of a young person such as J accessing cross-hormone treatment from any offshore, online, unregulated private clinic.’ The prescription was for an intramuscular injection of testosterone every six weeks, and this was administered by J’s NHS GP. However, in the opinion of an expert Australian paediatric endocrinologist who was consulted on the matter, J’s testosterone levels were dangerously high.

Commentary
A number of assumptions, all of them highly questionable, are made in the above case.

First, as I have argued before, there’s no evidence that the state of being transgender exists as an entity found in nature. It’s merely an idea, sense, feeling, or delusion in the mind of the person. It may be strongly and sincerely held, and that should be respected, but it’s a very precarious basis, especially in a child, on which to proceed to drastic irreversible bodily modifications. In no other branch of medicine is such an approach used, especially when it’s merely on the say-so of a child.

These alterations are brought about through using a puberty blocker, usually followed by cross-sex hormones. The prescription of such drugs will intentionally cause an abnormal hormonal state, with the expectation that the opposite sex hormone will be administered for the rest of the person’s life. The long-term effects of the drugs used in this way are unknown, but clearly there are risks involved.

Third, doctors should only prescribe or administer drugs if they consider these are in the patient’s best interests; they should make their own assessment and not blindly follow the advice of so-called experts. What would I have done if I had been the GP involved in J’s case? A physically healthy girl of 15 with a history of mental problems independently obtains a prescription for testosterone from an ‘offshore, online, unregulated private clinic’ and requests me to inject her with it. Alarm bells would ring.

This girl needs psychotherapy – not potentially damaging abnormal hormone injections.

Text © Gabriel Symonds

Picture credit: Manuel Chinchilla on Unsplash