Grappler Truth Teller Feller
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Australian Politics
Posts: 82602
Proud pre-1850's NO Voter
Gender:
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"Sex reassignment from male to female or female to male is not a benign medical procedure. Hormones and puberty blockers influence growth and development, and trans people are subject to increased risk of various illnesses. A recent Macdonald-Laurier Institute paper (Pike, Hilton and Howe 2021) contains an excellent discussion of the known short- and long-term harms of medical procedures aimed at gender reassignment.
Unfortunately, these aggressive interventions are not based on scientific studies demonstrating overall long-term benefit, nor studies showing which children are most likely to achieve benefit or harm, nor any studies assessing how many young people suffering from ROGD later change their minds and embrace their birth sex. Missing too is information about the proportion of people of various ages who have had gender reassignment procedures who subsequently regret having had those procedures.
Indeed, it seems that mental health issues, and particularly depression, are worse among trans adults (Kattari et al. 2020) than among the general population. There are allegations and opinion, but not sound evidence, that mental health improves after transition surgery (Ring and Malone 2020). We do not know if these mental health disturbances arise because of how trans people are treated by families, physicians, and communities or whether they indicate abnormal biology.
In the absence of the sort of evidence listed above, how can adults, parents, and children decide what to do in the face of conflicting advice from credentialed advisors? And given the politicization of these issues, not least by so-called “conversion therapy” bans, many medical professionals are reluctant to inform young patients fully of risks, or to suggest counselling, for fear of falling afoul of such legislation. Yet medical professionals and regulators should fully expect that detransitioners, those who regret their transition, will be angry and hold to account a medical establishment that refused to inform them fully at the time of their decision about the risks.
In this regard, the experience of the Tavistock Gender Clinic (formally known as the Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS)) in the UK is instructive. At one time the flagship gender disorder clinic in the UK, the Tavistock has recently been shut down by regulators after a damning independent report (Sex Matters 2022) for precisely these issues: uncritically taking at face value young people’s gender dysphoria and immediately prescribing hormones, “puberty blockers” and even surgery with little or no effort to understand or communicate the risks to their patients. According to The Independent, “Staff, patients and parents have raised concerns that young people using the service were put on the pathway to transitioning too early and before they had been properly assessed.” Massive class-action lawsuits (Lovett 2022) are now expected to be filed against the clinic for failure to respect their professional duties to their patients. One of the lawyers involved, barrister Thomas Goodhead, is quoted as saying that the case “is going to be one of the largest medical negligence scandals of all time” (Times Radio 2022)."
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