No End to the Gender Incongruence Nonsense

They’re still at it! Thanks to a BBC report we learn that there is an ‘Independent Patient Safety Investigation into prescribing practices at WellBN GP practice in Brighton and Hove.’

Why do they have to call their practice by an unpronounceable name? It reminds me of Mr Bean saying the name ‘Bob’. I suppose the medical practice gets noticed by the passing public, but in the current brouhaha it draws attention to itself for all the wrong reasons.

Let’s take a deep dive – no, I hate that stupid expression. Let’s rather say we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty. We’re told that the investigation was ‘looking at the prescribing of medications to children under 18 that fell outside of NHS commissioned services, clinical policy, and guidance,’ particularly for ‘children and young people seeking support for gender dysphoria or incongruence who should be referred to specialist services.’

Now hang on a minute! Specialist services mean specialist gender services. And what might those be? As an example, let’s look at what the website of NHS Leeds Gender Identity Service has to say.

The first thing they say is, ‘We’re a diverse bunch at the Leeds Gender Identity Service.’ Ah, how nice that they use such a patient-friendly expression. Or are they merely talking down to the lowest educational level of their potential patients? You can have a bunch of flowers or bananas, or a lovely bunch of coconuts, and that’s about it.

Anyway, the bunch consists, I kid you not, of the following, no doubt highly qualified, personnel (note the plurals):

• Consultant clinical psychologists and clinical psychologists
• Consultant psychiatrists or psychiatrists
• Consultant endocrinologists
• Doctors with a special interest in endocrinology
• Pharmacist – it seems they manage with only one of these
• Gender identity specialist nurses
• Speech and language therapists
• Gender outreach workers

It makes one wonder, in these days of the cash-strapped and under-staffed NHS, where they get all these people from and how they obtain the funds to pay them.

For more information of what these good people do, let’s start at the top of the list. The clinical psychologists, whether consultants or otherwise, ‘Assess for [a diagnosis of] gender dysphoria/incongruence and readiness to progress onto the care pathway.’ You might go to the ‘Easy Read’ versions, which would be better called the dumbed-down versions, for information on the roles of the various staff making up the bunch.

One thing is, or ought to be, obvious: referral of physically normal children and teenagers to a so-called Gender Identity Service implies a decision to treat accordingly. That is, with abnormal hormonal administration and even mutilating surgery. And by the way, what superior knowledge do these specialist have that ordinary doctors, including GPs, don’t have?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. So-called gender dysphoria or incongruence are purely subjective states. They refer to a child or young person’s feeling, belief, or delusion that they were born in the ‘wrong’ body. No one is born in the wrong body, and no objective test exists for these states of mind. If a physically normal child or teenager suffers marked distress from a discrepancy between his or her sex and ‘gender identity,’ this is a psychological problem and may need psychological treatment.

What should never be done in the above situation is the administration of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, or the provision of mutilating surgery. Such interventions would be a travesty of medical or surgical treatment; they should be made illegal.

Text © Gabriel Symonds

Picture credit: Pix4Free.org