Posted on 12/17/2019 8:33:28 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Thirty-five psychologists have resigned from the children’s gender-identity service in London in the last three years as there has been an exponential increase in referrals for gender dysphoria in the last decade, according to a British television news report.
Sky News reached out to 20 of the 35 psychologists who resigned in the last three years from the National Health Service’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London.
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a clinic where children as young as three come to receive puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormone treatment, which can have life-long effects on children.
The six former NHS psychologists who spoke with Sky News expressed concerns about the over-authorizing of hormone treatment to children with gender dysphoria and felt they couldn’t properly explore underlying psychological factors.
Their resignations come at a time when the number of children referred to GIDS for gender dysphoria has increased from 77 in 2009-2010 to 2,590 last year, according to Sky News’s research.
As a result, the caseload for clinicians at NHS is “three times higher than the average” health service at about 120 to 130 per junior clinician, one psychologist told Sky News.
Additionally, over 3,000 kids are on a waiting list for the GIDS. Kids who have been referred to the clinic will have to wait as long as three years to receive an appointment, according to The Guardian.
"Our fears are that young people are being over-diagnosed and then over-medicalized,” one psychologist told the outlet, asking to remain unnamed.
"We are extremely concerned about the consequences for young people. ... For those of us who previously worked in the service, we fear that we have had front row seats to a medical scandal."
The psychologist explained in an interview published in a short documentary that on one occasion she was working with an NHS executive who decided to refer a young person for hormone-blocking treatment after two appointments.
The psychologist said that the patient had a history of trauma and suffered from “other things happening to them,” such as abuse.
“This was not really explored by the clinician,” she said.
The psychologist said that she didn’t feel she was able to voice her concerns and that when she did, she was “often shut down by other affirmative clinicians.”
"Looking back, there are young people who I now wouldn't necessarily put on medication,” the psychologist stressed.
Another psychologist told Sky News that “therapy is not an option in this service.”
Another said: “We fear that we have had front row seats to a medical scandal.”
In a statement, GIDS assured that psychologists “have regular supervision sessions where they can discuss any concerns.” The service added that it “supports every young person on a case-by-case basis, as an individual.”
“There are numerous other forums in which to raise issues and concerns," the GIDS statement reads. "GIDS takes a considered and thoughtful approach, and supports clinicians to engage openly and supportively with patients and parents.”
GIDS conducted exit interviews with all departing staff to understand their reasons for resignation, according to the statement.
"The work is demanding and the pressures of operating in a busy service facing a high level of unfair criticism are intense,” the statement added.
For its documentary, Sky News interviewed Thomasin, a 19-year-old who spent many of her teenage years identifying as a male. Although she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria by GIDS at the age of 17, she never medically transitioned and has since de-transitioned back to living as a female.
"Mainly the thing that was fueling me was that I didn't fit in and I didn’t know anything. And then I was slowly drip-fed this idea that you could change sex," Thomasin explained.
“I wanted to have hormones and be a man, have top surgery and go down beaches topless and living my life like that.”
Sky News reports that about half of the children referred to GIDS are put on hormone blockers to block the impact of puberty on prepubescent children before they can begin cross-sex hormone treatment at the age of 16. But doctors have warned that going through hormone therapy and even puberty suppression can have an irreversible impact on the health of a child.
GIDS Senior Clinician Bernadette Bernadette Wren was also interviewed for the documentary. Wren said that the clinic fully informs children about the consequences in their teenage years.
“The work that we do to really inform these young people as fully as we can for what this means … for them physically, what the irreversible impacts [are], what are the impacts on fertility, what are the possible impacts on their sexuality, relationships in the future,” Wren said.
“The young people who perhaps come to us and thought they would like to review their decision, they always said that they felt that we have done everything that we could to make clear to them the gravity of the choice that they are making.”
Fueling the rise in children being referred for gender services in the U.K. is a drastic rise in biological females coming forward to seek therapy. Sky News reports that the proportion of patients referred to GIDS who were female at birth has risen from 44 percent to 77 percent in the last decade.
“The numbers started growing from 2012, when we started seeing more females coming forward,” the unnamed psychologist said in the documentary. “This has happened across the Western world.”
The psychologist was asked by the interviewer if she felt that she was able tell a parent that she didn’t believe their child was transgender.
“No,” the psychologist said. “This is one of the reasons why I decided to leave the service. As a psychologist, I felt if I ever spoke to a family like this, I would immediately be called ‘transphobic.’’’
In July, the 50,000-member Royal College of General Practitioners warned about the lack of “robust evidence” on the long-term effects of puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones.
“There is a significant lack of robust, comprehensive evidence around the outcomes, side effects and unintended consequences of such treatments for people with gender dysphoria,” the RCGP policy statement reads.
The RCGP statement warned that the lack of evidence prevents doctors from “helping patients and their families in making an informed decision.”
>> medical scandal
Understatement. It’s predatory abuse.
It’s a lot of work pretending to be the opposite sex.
It takes a lot of people to pull off the myth.
Doctors ( a life time of treatments) and lawyers (must sue anyone who doesn’t play along)
Once it is done its impossible to fully return to your assigned gender (assigned at birth that is)
I can reduce the backlog by 3/4 with two simple screenings:
Screen the kids for autism. Many of the kids (especially girls) getting shoehorned this direction are actually autistic. Treat the autism with appropriate therapy (because they’re not “trans”). That probably addresses 1/4 of the backlog.
Screen the parents for evidence of Munchausen by Proxy. When it is there, it’s always going to be the mums (this is what happened in the case of James Younger in Texas—his pediatrician (non-bio) mom was MbP). Remove kids from the affected parent(s) and/or grant full custody of kids to non-affected parent; give parents appropriate therapy; give kids appropriate therapy (because they’re not “trans”). This is probably about half of the backlog.
And it’s still cheaper than treating them for “gender identity disorder” for the rest of their lives.
Start by neutering the parents.
The left’s attempt to make gender dysphoria victims feel normalized by inundating society with awareness is creating thousands more victims as impressionable young minds are being influenced by the constant bombardment.
No, you witless moron. You should fear dysfunctional, incompetent parents are looking for the son, or daughter, they wanted but didn't get.
Excellent article which, if standard FReeper comments to virtually any transgender item are any indication, almost nobody actually read.
The article suggests pushback is beginning to happen within the transgender “industry” itself.
“The psychologist said that the patient had a history of trauma and suffered from “other things happening to them,” such as abuse...
Another said: ‘We fear that we have had front row seats to a medical scandal.’”
Thanks for posting, SeekAndFind.
It’s the new business model for quack psychologists and quack physicians, they look forward to these messed up people business coming and going. First when they diagnose them and make bundles and later they make more bundles when those same people realize what an error they made and are so messed up they need more drugs/therapy/surgery to reverse it.
One politically correct theory about transgenderism claims it is caused by brain structure: a boy developing a girl-type brain, or vice versa. That theory has been shot down by a study from the Society for Neuroscience, reported by Science Daily:
A new theory of gender dysphoria argues the symptoms of the condition are due to changes in network activity, rather than incorrect brain sex, according to work recently published in eNeuro.
Gender dysphoria is a state of extreme distress caused by the feeling that a person’s true gender does not match the gender assigned at birth. The leading theory of the mechanism behind gender dysphoria attributes the condition to people possessing brains regions with the size and shape of the opposite sex, instead of their biological sex. However, recent brain imaging studies don’t support that theory.
Stephen Gliske, publishing his theory in eNeuro, believes brain size and shape does not cause gender dysphoria. It’s in the brain networking, which is pliable:
He proposes gender dysphoria is caused by altered activity in three networks — the distress, social behavior, and body-ownership networks — affecting distress and one’s sense of their own gender. Previous studies support the premise that activity changes in these networks are associated with anatomical changes and feelings of gender dysphoria.
The new theory may disturb those looking to excuse and maintain their dysphoria. But it offers good news for people suffering from unnecessary distress who believe falsely that their brain makes them confused about their gender. “If supported by further research,” the press release says with a bit of hedging, “this theory could offer ways to treat the distress of gender dysphoria patients without relying on invasive and irreversible gender reassignment surgery.”
In the paper, Gliske presents his “updated theory of gender dysphoria” with hope that it “may lead to therapies which directly address the underlying biology rather than just the subjective symptoms.” Gliske doesn’t state the following implications, but it seems the least invasive way to correct gender dysphoria is to help individuals to love and accept the gender that matches their biological reality. A healthy society should correct dysphoria with phoria, the ability for both eyes to focus together. Gender dysphoria puts the body and mind out of sync.
Does a healthy culture wish to keep people cross-eyed? Like giving drug addicts free needles and drugs, acceptance only prolongs the harm. The loving thing is to help turn dysphoria into eudaimonia, a harmonious integration of mind and body.
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