The Snowman
Update 494. UK Government Guidance Special. #BeMorePorcupine
Gosh, there’s lots of important stuff in this update. Get reading!
I intend to provide a final pre-Christmas update on Monday and then will see if I can vault across to the New Year but this depends on whether the Terf News quietens down!! In the meantime, our penultimate Christmas film is The Snowman (1982) based on the book by Raymond Briggs.
In a rural area of Brighton, after a night of heavy snowfall, a young boy named James wakes up and plays in the snow, eventually building a large snowman. At the stroke of midnight, he sneaks downstairs to find the snowman magically comes to life.
Thanks to three wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
Court of Appeal decision
Sarah Phillimore on her substack reports on an important Court of Appeal interim decision.
Can the court override the wishes of a 16 year old who wants to take cross sex hormones? TLDR: yes
A significant Court of Appeal decision that would have been impossible prior to the Cass Review. Hopefully indicates that childhood medical transition will from now on be subject to proper scrutiny.
Dec 19, 2024
On 19th December 2024, the Court of Appeal agreed in the case of O v P and Q, that it was wrong to dismiss proceedings about a child wanting cross sex hormones in the face of parental opposition, once that child was 16. Proceedings would be adjourned to consider the result of a further assessment with GenderPlus because of the rapidly changing landscape regarding medical transition. The Court of Appeal agreed it had the power to override a competent child’s consent, even when that child was 16 However, the Court of Appeal declined to designate medical transition should be a ‘special category’ of treatment, thus requiring automatic oversight by the courts.
This is a significant step forward for the family courts which have shown to be dangerously captured by gender identity ideology over the years. Bell v Tavistock in 2020 was a seismic event that triggered the Cass Review – but the Court of Appeal then rowed back. In 2019 the High Court was prepared to find there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ to support the social transition of a 4 and 7 year old. In 2023 the President of the Family Division (who sat in the Court of Appeal for these proceedings) was willing to send a teenage girl out of the country to have her breasts removed – a procedure that would be unlawful here.
The Court of Appeal’s decision that medical transition requires a little more scrutiny in a post Cass landscape is a welcome course correction – but a ‘throwaway’ comment about the Review itself does remind me that we are not out of the woods yet.
The full piece is here:
https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/can-the-court-override-the-wishes
The judgment is here:
https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/o-v-p-and-q-2/
EDI Jester deals with this here:
Moira Deeming - Vindication
My two parter on the Moira Deeming judgment is here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/moira-deeming-part-1-0b7
and here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/moira-deeming-part-2-f69
Soon after the Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne, it became apparent that it was not really possible to say that ‘the Nazis’ were invited by the LWS organisers ( albeit that many trans rights activists and much of the media repeated this outright lie), so Mr Pesutto, the leader of the Liberal Party, sought to impugn Moira by saying she associated with Nazis or Nazi sympathisers ie. Kellie-Jay Keen and Angie Jones.
However, by this date all the old defamatory allegations about Kellie-Jay (many arising from the simple fact that she can't know exactly who is turning up at a LWS event) had been well and truly shredded but Pesutto and his team dug them all out again without any further examination. It should have been very easy, for example, to locate this article by Heather Brunskell-Evans on Savage Minds from 2022: https://savageminds.substack.com/p/policing-adult-human-females
And a bit later, after the awful scenes at Auckland (fuelled by the lies from the Liberals, Labour, the Greens and the Aussie and Kiwi MSM),they could have considered the article by Julian Vigo also on Savage Minds:
And surely by then they could have realised that their allegations were based on nothing but hot air! But, no, Pesutto plugged on!!
Great piece on her substack Szego Unplugged by Julie Szego who was present at the rally.
Vindication in the Federal Court
Dec 17, 2024
Rally photos by Natalie J. Russell
**
So how are we going with the whole trans issues are politically “fringe” schtick?
I’m talking about the idea, usually delivered as a homily from progressive pundits, that our leaders are unlikely to suffer political blowback for implementing a radical “trans rights” agenda because no one apart from Christians and radical feminists gives a damn?
Well, let’s survey the recent casualties. There’s Scotland’s former chief minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Last February she dithered before the cameras when asked if she considered two-time convicted rapist Isla Bryson, blonde wig brushed over his face tatts just so, a “woman.” Already engulfed in an unrelated scandal, Sturgeon was now also a laughing stock — within weeks she resigned. Kamala Harris and the Biden administration became a laughing stock, and the butt of a killer pro-Trump campaign ad, for aggressively promoting the inclusion of males in women’s sport and the rights of prisoners to publicly-funded sex-change surgeries. We know how that election turned out.
And now, down-under in the state of Victoria, Opposition leader John Pesutto found himself on Thursday wiping the egg from his face, and wondering how he might cough up $300,000 in damages and a likely costs bill of several million, after the Federal Court ruled he had on multiple occasions defamed his parliamentary colleague Moira Deeming in the aftermath of Melbourne’s infamous Let Women Speak rally gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
As the patron saint of TERFs (c’mon, look the term up if you still don’t know) J.K Rowling put it, in a tweet congratulating Deeming:
“The ‘right side of history’ is racking up a hell of a lot of losses recently, isn’t it?”
**
Deeming had alleged Pesutto falsely portrayed her as knowingly associating with neo-Nazis and being a neo-Nazi sympathiser. While Pesutto remains leader of his party, the judgment has galvanised his internal critics and rivals. At the time of writing a Liberal party room meeting has been called for Friday. The only certainty in the immediate future is a run of bad headlines for the Liberals.
Ah the irony! For a run of bad headlines was precisely what Pesutto had been hoping to avoid with his strenuous efforts to evict Deeming from the parliamentary party. As the voluminous evidence in the case revealed — and as anyone with a half-functional political antenna already sussed — in the rally’s aftermath Pesutto was spooked at the prospect of being “clobbered” by premier Daniel Andrews and his cheerleaders in the progressive media in the event he did not move against Deeming.
As it happened, the episode has turned into a long-running series, and exposed the injustice inflicted on Deeming, on the rally organisers and on the other women present at the protest last March. Victoria is clearly the place to be if you want to annex the city every weekend to call for the elimination by any means necessary of the world’s only Jewish state; but gather once in a blue moon to insist sex is real and it matters and our esteemed leaders line up to accuse you of Nazism.
Extreme transactivists and our ideologically-captured institutions of state have largely managed to suppress public debate on contentious policies surrounding sex and gender by demonising prominent critics of gender self-ID — a regime enabling anyone to change their legal sex through a simple bureaucratic process — as Nazi-adjacent bigots.
So, naturally, the Labor party and the Greens were overjoyed at the optics the day of the rally for here were a bunch of TERFS and their allies literally adjacent to several dozen men in black who the media generously affirmed as “Nazis.” (As one devastatingly astute journalist friend put it: “Oh the pearl clutching about ‘actual Nazis’ .. as though those cosplaying ninnies had come straight from the annexation of the Sudetenland.”)
Leaders brazenly conflated the disproportionately leftist women at the Let Women Speak rally with the neo-Nazis. Federal MP Josh Burns tweeted of “the ugly alliance” between “anti-trans bullies” and neo-Nazis on display in the city. “I’m disgusted by the anti-trans rally in Melbourne,” tweeted Greens leader Adam Bandt MP, “protected by their allies: saluting neo-Nazis.” Then this from premier Daniel Andrews himself: “Anti-trans activists gathered to spread hate .. And on the steps of our Parliament, some of them performed a Nazi salute.”
At this point an alternative, imaginary Pesutto, the Pesutto I’m still hoping might one day materialise, expressed his disgust about the men Sieg Heil’ing on the steps of parliament while also defending against attack the innocent women rallying that day, including his own MP.
The actual Pesutto panicked.
The full piece is here and I recommend it:
https://szegounplugged.substack.com/p/vindication-in-the-federal-court?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Single Sex Spaces
The Office for Equality and Opportunity has responded to the call for evidence about the single sex spaces guidance (17 December).
Overall, 404 individual pieces of guidance which fit the response criteria outlined on the call for input gov.uk page were submitted. After reviewing these examples, we found that the majority seem to correctly interpret the Equality Act’s single-sex spaces provisions. In some cases, guidance reflected the organisation’s own policy to allow those with the ‘gender reassignment’ protected characteristic access to single-sex spaces that correspond with their self-identified gender, but did not incorrectly suggest that this is mandated by the Act. Had organisations suggested that their policy was mandated by the Act, however, this would have been a clear misinterpretation of the law.
Approximately 10% of the guidance submitted had text or examples that seem to have misinterpreted the Act’s single-sex spaces provisions. This was in a number of nuanced ways, including not acknowledging that the Act allows providers to exclude those with the ‘gender reassignment’ protected characteristic where justified, or, acknowledging but misinterpreting these exceptions.
This suggests that there is confusion or a lack of awareness among some service providers and some of the public about the Act’s single-sex exceptions, and how to apply them in practice. Although guidance does exist, the results of this call for input suggest that there is further work to do to ensure everyone has clarity about these exceptions in a range of different contexts. The Minister for Women and Equalities has since written to the EHRC as the independent regulator to share the findings from the call for input and to ask them to review the examples of guidance that seem to have misinterpreted the Equality Act.
Moving forward, we will explore the best ways in which we can give providers assurance about the rights afforded by the Act and how to lawfully apply the exceptions, including through guidance. We want to ensure that everyone is able to receive the support they need and feel safe when accessing a variety of different services.
This seems to fly in the face of the promise from Sir Keir Starmer to protect women’s single sex spaces. I reported on that here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/vote-for-the-vulnerable?utm_source=publication-search
Susanna Siddell in GB News (‘It’s an embarrassment!’ Starmer urged to scrap ‘careless’ guidance on single sex spaces 18 December) reports:
Feminist activists and politicians have blasted Labour’s latest “careless” guidance on single sex spaces, urging the Government to scrap the document altogether.
In an adamant defence of women’s only spaces, journalist and gender activist Helen Joyce told the People’s Channel that the “legally illiterate” document was “misrepresenting and misunderstanding the Equality Act”.
Lecturer Michael Foran explained that the document suggested that “it is lawful to operate a single-sex service on a mixed-sex basis, determined by self-ID” and that it “fails to consider the prohibition on indirect discrimination and harassment”.
The guidance, published yesterday in response to a previous call for input from public bodies across the nation, has attracted a slew of criticism for its ambiguity on single-sex spaces and its failure to wholeheartedly defend women's spaces.
Helen Joyce© GB News
Campaign group Sex Matters's Maya Forstater deemed it to be a “brush off” by the Government, labelling it as a “lazy kick in the teeth to women”.
Speaking to GB News, Joyce criticised the Government for its disregard of women’s stories, adding that she was “absolutely livid” over the matter.
“Hundreds or maybe thousands of women put thousands of hours of unpaid work into this, just to end up with this careless, badly written, legally illiterate from the Government today, misrepresenting and misunderstanding the Equality Act.”
“They should withdraw the statement they put out today. It's an embarrassment," she added.
The full article is here:
I am increasingly thinking we may need a criminal offence forbidding larping men from deliberately entering women’s single sex spaces (actually my wife first suggested this to me). All thoughts gratefully received.
Schools Guidance
Safe Schools Alliance have reported on their website about a Department for Education consultation meeting.
Meeting with the Department for Education
This month we were invited to a meeting with the Department for Education in London to discuss their draft guidance for schools on gender questioning children and the LGBT content in the draft RSHE guidance.
The previous government’s consultation on gender questioning children closed in March 2024, and the consultation on revised relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) statutory guidance closed in July 2024. This month’s meeting was set up by the Department for Education as part of the work they are now doing to analyse the consultation responses, consider the evidence and “talk to stakeholders to understand how best to ensure children’s wellbeing so they will thrive at school.”
Our spokeswoman Tracy Shaw attended a 90-minute roundtable with representatives from other organisations. Each contributor was given a limited time to make their points individually. However we have been assured that the key outputs from this meeting will be summarised and shared with ministers.
Below is the text of Tracy Shaw’s submission on behalf of Safe Schools Alliance:
“No child should be treated as if they are the opposite sex in schools. This guidance is an inadequate response to a systemic safeguarding failure. Safeguarding must be prioritized in law and enforced by this department, which has consistently failed to centre children’s wellbeing. Activists in the civil service, teaching profession, unions, and others are driving policies that undermine safeguarding. Any guidance on this issue needs to use and refer to KCSIE which is the bedrock of safeguarding in schools. Safeguarding training needs to be improved, audited and approved at government level to ensure everyone is getting the same message.
The conflation of inclusion and safeguarding in school leadership roles has deepened this failure, as DEI initiatives take precedence over children’s wellbeing. Parental alienation is widespread, perpetuated by weak safeguarding frameworks. The complaints system is not fit for purpose and schools are marking their own homework. This guidance does little to restore trust or resolve these failures. Only a public inquiry can do that.
Lobby groups have sold politically indoctrinated, damaging and inaccurate education materials to time-poor schools, and we are seeing instances of students who have been groomed by adult activists running LGBT+ lunchtime clubs for vulnerable children with no safeguarding applied. These groups are often focussed solely on gender and push to change school policy, whilst school leaders disregard their safeguarding training and allow them to go ahead unchecked. If this involved any other political issue, Prevent would be invoked, and concerns about radicalisation raised.
It is alarming that the Department for Education lacks both the expertise and willingness to grasp these concerns, despite repeated evidence. We have been delivering materials and policies that contravene the Education Act and safeguarding to this department for 5 years and we have been repeatedly told there is nothing the DfE can do as it’s up to the schools to decide what is appropriate. Any emails between your department and Safe Schools Alliance will demonstrate how our concerns have been minimised and rejected. In the same way Justin Welby ignored warnings within his Church, these issues are being dismissed. When the inevitable public inquiry, judicial review and class action lawsuits occur, let it be on record that these systematic breaches in safeguarding, fuelled by gender activism, were consistently raised.
Finally, safer recruitment must be properly understood and embedded, not only amongst those working directly with children in any capacity but also amongst those working on policy, materials, or legislation that affects children. We have seen too many incidents of people working in leadership roles in LGBT+ organisations have been found to be predatory. The application of Safer Recruitment would have ensured these people were not allowed access to children, or to write materials for schools or to influence policy.
We would be interested to ask, for the record, who in this room has had safeguarding and safer recruitment training as everyone who writes policy for schools needs to have robust and up to date safeguarding training?”
Only one person said she had had the training, and this was in her capacity as a school governor rather than as a result of working in the Department for Education. It is worth noting that nobody responsible for the KCSIE (Keeping Children Safe in Education) guidance was present at the meeting.
Although we have doubts over the breadth and depth of engagement on this issue from the DfE, we recognise that they are now asking for input from groups like ours where previously they did not. We felt it was important to state our concerns for the record, and hope that they will be noted.
https://safeschoolsallianceuk.net/2024/12/17/department-for-education-meeting/
Well done, Tracy Shaw.
The Royal College of GPs
Rebecca Says No reports on the Glinner Update about the capture by the gender woo of the Royal College of GPs.
The Gender Identity Takeover of the Royal College of GPs
Dec 18, 2024
In October 2024, I wrote about the ways in which internal activist doctors and gender lobby groups Gendered Intelligence and Stonewall have been allowed to have unfettered influence over the Royal College of Paediatrics. The extent of this was shown by the college giving Gendered Intelligence an article advertising its services in the national magazine for paediatricians in Spring 2023. This article encouraged paediatric doctors to support social transition for child and adolescent patients, going against the recommendations of the Interim Cass Review. It also stated that these patients should be allowed to be accommodated in opposite sex spaces within hospitals.
Unfortunately, internal activists and external gender lobby groups have also had an incredible amount of influence over several other medical royal colleges in the UK. One of these is the Royal College of GPs, which is for doctors who often have the first contact with patients in their medical journey. In light of the news that the current government has recently announced that it is permanently banning puberty blockers, the Royal College of GPs’ historical and current stance on the topic of ‘gender identity’ is troubling.
The Affirmation Only Memorandum of Understanding
Many people will not be aware that the Royal College of GPs signed and remains a signatory of the contentious ‘Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK Version 2’, which states that ‘[demonstrating] an assumption that any [...] gender identity is inherently preferable to any other’ and trying to change this is conversion therapy and should be prohibited. The problem with this line of thinking is that so-called ‘gender identity’ has no evidence base for being a fixed and inherent aspect of a patient and many argue that the concept is based solely on sex stereotypes. It also means that GPs have been signed up to the idea that they cannot disagree with medical harm for patients based upon ‘gender identity’ and must prioritise this internal status over the physical body.
Concerns around safeguarding issues for children and adolescents recently led the counselling body the UK Council for Psychotherapy (the UKCP) to withdraw their signature from this Memorandum of Understanding. In April 2024, the UKCP stated ‘The current MoU was drafted to apply to adults and was retrospectively applied to children and young people without consultation with the relevant bodies and child therapists with the specialist and regulatory knowledge of working with children and young people’. The UKCP goes on to cite the MoU’s failure to consider children’s needs based on their stages of development and their lack of ability to give informed consent. It also describes the risk of future lawsuits for its members should it remain signed up to this, alongside the fact that emerging evidence increasingly contradicts the MoU.
The full piece is here:
BBC - Larping Footballer of the Year!
Eliana Silver in GB News (Protesters take to the streets outside BBC offices as broadcaster awards 'Women's Footballer of the Year' to player who failed to meet gender regulations over 'high testosterone' 17 December) reports:
Protesters have gathered outside the BBC offices as the broadcaster awarded “Women’s Footballer of the Year” to a player who failed to meet gender eligibility rules.
Barbara Banda, 24, was handed the award on Tuesday, despite previously being withdrawn from the 2022 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations over gender regulation concerns.
The Orlando Pride player received the most votes from BBC Sport website readers after being part of a five-player shortlist.
The broadcaster’s decision has sparked outrage from women’s rights groups, including the campaigners Twelve O Five.
Protesters take to the streets outside BBC offices as broadcaster awards 'Women's Footballer of the Year' to player who failed to meet gender regulations over 'high testosterone'© GB News
The group shared a post on their X account urging people to join them in protesting against the BBC outside their headquarters today.
They were joined by other campaign groups such as For Women Scotland, holding signs reading: “Save Women’s Sports” and “No Men in Women’s Sports.”
The full article is here:
Canada - In Defence of Women’s Sport
Eva Kurilova on her substack writes about a detailed defence of women’s sports.
PDF Québec's Comprehensive Defense of Women's Sports
A fantastic resource to share far and wide!
Dec 17, 2024
Recently, my friends at Pour les droits des femmes du Québec (PDF Québec) informed me that their excellent brochure about defending women’s sports had been translated into English and is available for download. I received the French version on March 8th at the Reality Based Women Unite! event. Not being bilingual like the lovely ladies at PDF Québec, I couldn’t read it! (Though I could tell it was an excellent resource).
I was super excited to receive this brochure, and you’ll see why if you take a look for yourself.
English version download link.
This comprehensive document looks at the issue of trans-identified men in women’s sports through the lenses of fairness, safety, opportunity, and privacy.
‘PDF Québec believes that people identifying as trans have, as does everyone, the right to participate in sports, whether simple recreational ones or competitive sports such as student or elite sports. However, we believe that it is essential to maintain an equitable playing field for everyone and to ensure that women benefit from the support and respect they are due regarding their integrity, dignity and humanity.’
It looks at the differences between men and women, limited not just to testosterone but including everything from average height to pelvis shape. It compares distance and time records for men and women at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, which paints a stark picture of those differences.
‘Faster than Flo Jo. What’s 10% between males and females? Flo Jo is around 10m behind [Usain] Bolt as he crosses the finish line, but there’s always some bloke who limps home last to great cheers and many congratulations for trying – would she beat that guy? The short answer is ‘no’.’
The risk of injury to women and the loss of spots in competitions and on podiums is also explored, as is the simple fact that women and girls deserve their privacy in the changing room.
‘[W]e need to ask ourselves why a man’s discomfort with the idea of changing in the presence of other men should take precedence over women’s discomfort with the idea of changing with a man.’
The 20-page document touches on every aspect of the sports debate, distilling each part into its most salient points. As someone who has been very interested in this aspect of gender ideology, I am thrilled to have all of this information collected in one place for easy reference. It’s going to be a lot easier for me to write articles on the topic while having it handy.
So please download to use for your own reference and share widely!
https://www.evakurilova.com/p/pdf-quebecs-comprehensive-defense?publication_id=1079486&r=1v403b
New Zealand - The Results of Self ID
Katrina Biggs on her substack A B’Old Woman gets back to language.
NZ’s Supreme Court refers to the adult male rapist of a child as “she”.
Dec 17, 2024
Just writing that title made me feel a bit sick in the stomach. This is the ‘gift’ that sex self-ID in New Zealand has given us, and will keep giving us, until both the law and the ideology enabling it are thrown into the fire pit where they belong.
In 1995, an 18-year-old man abducted a 12-year-old girl, tied a rope around her neck causing her to lose consciousness, and then raped her. He was sentenced to prison for 11 years for that, and “since then has either been in prison, on parole, or under an extended supervision order (ESO), which allows probation officers to monitor and manage someone considered a high risk for up to 10 years at a time.” It’s not difficult to see he’s amongst the worst dregs of society. Now this rapist says he’s a woman, and therefore thinks his supervision order should be lifted. Our Supreme Court denied him that – phew - but indulged him with female pronouns.
Sex self-ID was made law in New Zealand in mid-2023, and technically it’s about allowing people to change the sex recorded on their birth certificates to that of the opposite sex to which they were born, or to a ‘non-binary’ gender. However, it also gives heft to self-ID as an ideology which enables any person to identify as anyone or anything they want, in any situation, irrespective of what’s on their birth certificate. This ideology has been permeating into policies for some time, with full and enthusiastic collusion from so-called ‘progressives’. Anyone with half a brain can see that that’s a shit idea. But, to date, a male rapist of a child still gets called “she” by our Supreme Court if he simply desires it.
There is no legal obligation in New Zealand to consider someone the opposite sex to that which they were born due to a changed birth certificate, or upon their own say-so, nor to call them by opposite sex pronouns. Those who do this, do it because they want to, and then if they can, they make organisation-specific policies to enforce it. Their tyranny is justified as the cost of empathy for ‘transpeople’.
The full piece is here:
https://aboldwoman.substack.com/p/nzs-supreme-court-refers-to-the-adult
Iceland - Hate Crime
In the last episode of Free Speech Nation presented by him, Andrew Doyle interviews gay campaigner Eldur Kristinsson about the likelihood he will be prosecuted for certain gender critical posts concerning breastfeeding by men and other matters and the possibility that he may end up in prison!
https://substack.com/home/post/p-153399563
Gender Affirming Care
On the substack Reality’s Last Stand, Joseph Burgo provides a detailed examination of the truth about so called ‘gender affirming care.’
The Truth About ‘Gender-Affirming Care’
‘Gender-affirming’ doctors are medicalizing distress in the name of social justice.
Dec 16, 2024
This essay is adapted from Burgo, J. (2024). The medicalization of gender dysphoria. In A. Cantú, E. Maisel, & C. Ruby (Eds.), Institutionalized Madness: The Interplay of Psychiatry and Society’s Institutions (pp. 247–264). Ethics Press.
When I first encountered the apparently benign euphemism “gender-affirming care,” I assumed it meant taking at face value claims to have been “born in the wrong body” made by dysphoric teens and facilitating their access to hormones and surgery.
Working as an expert witness gave me a chance to look “under the hood” of GAC, so to speak, and confirmed my initial impressions. In reviewing years of therapy case notes from affirmative therapists, I found their “biopsychosocial assessments” to be cursory; minimal efforts were made to identify comorbid mental health issues (and only to ensure that they were separately managed), but claims to trans-identification were always validated.
Then I noticed something unusual in these records. When psychotherapists take on new clients, they usually present some form of informed consent/disclosure statement setting forth their policies and procedures; in addition to enumerating rules around payment and cancellation, such disclosure statements will usually describe the practitioner’s theoretical orientation. In reviewing the disclosure statements of affirming therapists, I found references to “anti-oppressive” and “intersectional” psychotherapy. Some therapists described their approach as supportive of BIPOC and other oppressed identities. I heard, for the first time, of “kink positive psychotherapy.”
In preparing to write the chapter from which this essay is adapted, I decided to dig deeper. Among other resources, I reviewed Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, a comprehensive guide published in 2023 by the American Psychiatric Association. This book (the “APA Guide”) contains separately authored chapters written by several dozen practitioners in the field. Because a grasp of the ideological language deployed throughout this book is crucial to understanding its argument, I quote extensively from its various chapters rather than summarizing them.
Minority Stress Theory
Nearly all the chapters explore and explain the well-known mental health co-morbidities of trans-identified youth through the identical lens—what is commonly known as the Minority Stress Theory, first propounded by sociologist and public health researcher Ilan H. Meyer (2003). Meyer attempted to account for the higher rates of mental health issues commonly observed within minority groups—particularly, sexual minorities such as lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals—by attributing them to the chronic stress they experience as a result of stigma, prejudice, and discrimination.
Meyer’s Minority Stress Theory has been adapted and expanded by the advocates for GAC to argue that the co-morbid mental health issues commonly observed among gender dysphoric youth are accounted for by the stigma and stress they experience living in a transphobic culture:
‘Transgender, nonbinary, and/or gender expansive (TNG) people often experience structural and enacted stigma, such as a hostile sociocultural climate, discrimination, rejection, victimization, and nonaffirmation related to their gender identity or expression…Stressors also stem from the general pervasive stigma against TNG people and oppressive systems and cultural norms that seek to invalidate or eliminate them [citations omitted]. These added layers of stressors explain the heightened mental health risks documented among TNG people [citations omitted].’(Matsuno et al., 2023, p. 23)
Most chapters in the APA Guide contain repeated references to this theory; the words “stress” and “stigma” appear dozens of times in reference to an expansive list of oppressed minorities: Two-Spirit People, Asian and Pacific Islander Communities, DoubleQueer (simultaneously neurodiverse and transgender), Disabled, Displaced, and Elderly Transgender people, et cetera.
Taken together, the various chapters in Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care supercharge Meyer’s careful analysis of the stress experienced by LGB individuals and turn it into a comprehensive account of victimization suffused with postmodern thought and social justice ideology. References to familiar systems of oppression abound—the patriarchy, colonialism, racism, et cetera. To give one impressive example, in critiquing prior studies on “transness”:
‘[I]t is necessary to approach these studies understanding that the research was conducted under the context emerging from normative cisheteropatriarchal white European colonialist gender norms. [ Dusty -wow, this should get a special bull***t award!]As a form of social structure these neuro sexist and racist norms affect the perception of the researcher [citations omitted].’ (Sun et al., 2023, p. 34)
Another chapter which discusses the care of transgender people displaced from their countries of origin begins with this sweeping portrait of the forces of oppression experienced by this group: “Structural and infrastructural violence, perpetuated by capitalism, neoliberalism, imperialism, racism, cisgenderism, and heterocentrism, create their international displacement and migration” (Janeway & Anaya, 2023, p. 139). The authors’ critique of oppression is rooted in neo-Marxist thought, with its focus on power dynamics between groups:
‘Borders are manifestations of the power of citizenship, and they uphold the inequities that create structural and infrastructural determinants of health. From a human rights perspective, clinicians must see borders for what they are: artificial lines drawn through, by, and in support of those in power.’ (Janeway & Anaya, 2023, pp. 140-141)
Throughout the APA Guide, nearly all the well-known mental health comorbidities demonstrated by gender dysphoric youth are understood and explained through this lens. Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidality can all be accounted for by the Minority Stress Theory. And failing to understand how minority stress afflicts TNG people means misapprehending the ultimate source of their comorbid mental health issues: “Without taking these contextual factors into account, clinicians may misattribute mental health issues to a person’s gender experience or pathologize TNG identities” (Matsuno et al., 2023, p. 25).
In the rare event that the authors do not account for co-morbid mental health issues with reference to minority stress, they emphasize that being neurodiverse, for example, should be viewed as a separate and distinct issue and not an impediment to receiving GAC: “Autism alone is insufficient reason to infer incapacity and deny or delay gender-affirming care” (Adams et al., 2023, p. 113). Likewise, “[s]uicidality should not be viewed as a barrier to gender-affirming care when individuals maintain capacity for informed consent” (Joy et al., 2023, p. 265).
Even frank psychosis should not preclude receiving affirmative treatment:
‘Generally speaking if a person who experiences psychosis is able to draw on their organizational and executive functioning as needed to establish care with a medical provider, seek a referral letter from a health care provider with relevant competencies, obtain medications or surgical dates, and so on, that person's psychotic symptoms are adequately managed to engage in informed consent discussions.’ (Joy et al., 2023, p. 264)
Nowhere in this volume will you find a single case where the authors consider it valid to question a person’s claimed gender identity. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), in its Standards of Care Edition 8, recommends a thorough mental health evaluation for all patients prior to receiving hormones or surgery (Coleman et al., 2022). But according to APA’s Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, such an evaluation should only identify comorbid conditions to ensure that they are adequately managed, not to consider the possibility that they might contribute to a potentially mistaken belief about one’s internal identity.
Not a single example appears of a trans-identification accounted for by one of those comorbid conditions; the possibility that internalized homophobia might drive trans-identification is not even considered. And for the authors of this volume, it would seem that the apparently growing number of detransitioners do not exist. The Index includes a single entry for the phenomenon of detransition, and it refers exclusively to aged TNG adults who “feel pressure to detransition ... or actively conceal their identities out of fear of being misgendered, verbally ridiculed, or abused [citation omitted]” (Dolotina et al., 2023, p. 207), despite the fact that recent research suggests detransition occurs more often for personal reasons such as realizing that their gender dysphoria was caused by other factors, or by internalized homophobia (Littman, 2021; Vandenbussche, 2021).
The full piece is here:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-truth-about-gender-affirming?publication_id=225618&r=1v403b
Update from South Africa
On his substack, Gender Clinic News Bernard Lane looks at the situation in South Africa.
Think again
South Africa is sending mixed signals on the gender medicalisation of young people
Dec 18, 2024
South Africa’s Health Minister, Dr Pakishe Aaron Motsoaledi, has faced formal questions in the country’s National Assembly about the extent of the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery among young people and whether parental consent is required.
“[T]his area is currently being reviewed, particularly for children and adolescents, to ensure that all recommendations are in the best interest of this vulnerable population,” Dr Motsoaledi said in a brief reply to the questions concerning cross-sex hormones.
The minister said his National Department of Health lacked data on these hormonal and surgical interventions, and there were no age restrictions for cross-sex hormones. He did not say anything about the role of parental consent.
Dr Motsoaledi is medically trained and sits on the national executive committee of the left-leaning African National Congress, which governs in coalition with the classically liberal Democratic Alliance and other parties.
In his written reply published in October, the minister did not explain the scope or focus of what was being “reviewed,” but he made the remark in the context of a recent challenge to the country’s 2019 listing of cross-sex hormones as “national essential medicines.”
In his answer, Dr Motsoaledi also linked his reference to a South African review to April’s publication of England’s landmark Cass report and the end of routine use of puberty blockers in the UK.
Meanwhile, in South Africa’s province of Western Cape, a circular document promoting the contentious “gender-affirming” treatment model was released on provincial government letterhead in September.
“Nowhere does the document question the safety, evidence, efficacy or iatrogenic harms of cross-sex hormones and surgeries, much less the rapid and unexplained epidemiological shift in the patient cohort over time,” said a spokesperson for the parents’ group Our Duty South Africa.
In August, the regulatory Health Professions Council of South Africa issued a warning about the off-label use of drugs for minors with gender dysphoria and said it might develop some form of guidance for practitioners.
The council said that the executive committee of the Medical and Dental Professions Board—which protects the public by regulating the profession and can deregister doctors—had “issued an advisory to practitioners that the [use of off-label] drugs needs to be done with care, consent and be based on scientific evidence. Practitioners are advised to adhere to the above-mentioned advisory.”
The National Department of Health’s spokesman, Mr Foster Mohale, said that off-label use referred to the use of a medicine in a way different from the market authorisation; for example, he said, the medicine might be “used for different age groups, indications or routes of administration.”
“Off-label differs from unregistered medicines which have not been approved by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority,” Mr Mohale told GCN.
The full piece is here:
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/think-again
Women’s Rights, Gender Wrongs
Women’s Rights, Gender Wrongs is a publication from Women’s Declaration International which looks at the situation with regard to gender ideology in 38 (!!) countries. The book is edited by Sally Wainwright and Kath Aiken. Mr Menno has just released an interesting interview about the book with Sally (albeit that the interview took place in April after Let Women Speak in Edinburgh).
Endpiece by Liz
#BeMorePorcupine
#LetWomenSpeak
#Grassroots Army
#GenderIdeologyIsEvil
#ResignPesutto
Thanks Dusty, will have to take time to digest this. What strikes me is that the more progress we make in uncovering the insanity, the more we can see the depths of the destruction that gender ideology has caused everywhere. We think we’re getting somewhere and then we uncover more. It’s shocking how much we’re still up against and just how far the havoc has spread.
And another book to add to the reading list. 😁
#KeepOnTerfing
#BeMorePorcupine
A heads up, dear readers, that Mr Menno is doing a premiere tomorrow, Monday 23 December at 20.30 GMT which is an interview with Jenny of Scottish Lesbians about the recent Supreme Court case. Hope to see some of you there😃
I also aim to put out the final update before Christmas on or before tomorrow evening😀
Dusty