This is the problem with this. This very serious issue, has now become a fad with terrible consequences which you would have heard about had you watched the 60 minutes story and kept up on how this is "transforming" ( pun intended ) impressionable teenagers.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/m...female-to-male
Why do so many teenage girls want to change gender?
In the last 10 years, there has been an extraordinary increase in teenagers seeking to transition from female to male. What's behind it—and has the NHS been too quick to find a solution?
It is commonly acknowledged that while biological sex is genetically determined, gender is a social construct. A human being cannot—and should not—be reduced to their biology, or indeed their genitals, because psychologically we are as much a product of the way that other people treat us as we are of our genetic inheritance. Homo sapiens are social creatures: our ability to cooperate is what gave us the evolutionary upper hand over our stronger Neanderthal cousins. Without parents, siblings, peers, colleagues, friends and lovers our idea of ourselves would remain ill-defined—we wouldn’t know who we were.
Imagine you were raised by wolves in a cave—let’s call you Mowgli—but then later met another human of the opposite sex. You would notice the physiological differences. But as to interpreting those differences, where would you start? Without being exposed to the concept of “man” or “woman”—let alone “laddish” or “girly”—you’d lack any mental map to provide the pointers to the typically “male” and “female” behaviour instilled in us by human society.
Precisely because gender is a social construct, the evolution of its boundaries and meanings will tell us something fundamental about our society. And gender-wise something really big is going on in the UK—but it’s not the big something you might think.
Transsexuality is a talking point like never before, and a glance at the figures sheds some light on why. The number of children, in particular, being referred to the Tavistock and Portman Foundation Trust’s gender identity development service (Gids)—the NHS service through which all UK candidates for a sex change under 18 are funnelled—is up from 77 in 2009 to 2,590 in 2018-9. But what’s almost as dramatic as the headline numbers are developments in who is transitioning. In November 2017, the Guardian reported that 70 per cent of referrals were female. This was a surprising statistic because only 10 years previously the overall ratio had been more like 75 per cent males seeking to be female, and indeed it is still the gender traffic in that direction that dominates the increasingly noisy, divisive and panic-inflected debate.
Recently, though, alarm bells have begun to ring among a handful of psychiatric professionals about the number of teenage girls arriving at the Tavistock’s door and the nature of their treatment. Right now a legal case is being brought by Susan Evans, a former psychiatric nurse at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, alongside a parent of an autistic female child wishing to transition to be male, arguing that children are not legally capable of consenting to a gender transition. November last year saw the launch of the Detransition Advocacy Network, a UK group numbering several hundred members. And in January, the NHS announced an independent review into puberty suppressants and cross-sex hormone treatments, to be chaired by Hilary Cass, formerly president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
But until the end of 2019, you could be forgiven for thinking that a panic about trans women using the “wrong” toilet cubicles was the biggest gender issue of the day (instead of something that could be easily solved by affording everyone the same privacy). Whenever the issue flares up politically—as when the Labour leadership candidates were asked to sign a pledge that labelled trans rights sceptics as “hate groups,” or the Scottish government proposed reforms to allow a change of legal gender without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria—it always seems to come back to loos and changing rooms. These vitriolic debates keep bubbling up—especially online.
But there is a much bigger scandal brewing than any Twitterstorm. While there have been a great many thoughtful doctors at the Tavistock, the picture is sometimes disturbing. Marcus Evans, a psychotherapist and former governor of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, resigned in February 2019, citing an institutional rush to prescribe puberty-blocking hormone treatment to children questioning their gender and who may wish to transition. “The Tavistock is behaving recklessly with these kids who are in a distressed state,” he claims. What’s especially odd about the alleged rush to prescribe rather than consider alternatives, he argues, is that this clinic’s international reputation was built on the quality of its talking therapy.
“Over the last five to 10 years there has been a complete change in the profile of the people presenting,” says Evans. “These children believe that they are in the wrong body and they are very persistent and forceful in saying that they want a solution—and that that is physical intervention. But I’ve been in psychiatry for 40 years and when people are in a distressed state they often narrow things down and fix on one thing as a solution, putting pressure on clinicians for a magic bullet.”
In psychiatry “generally,” he says, the aim is to “open things out,” and take the time to ask questions about “what is going on.” After all, “adolescence is a moving picture. We move through experimenting with different identities as our bodies change and our role in society changes. An individual has to tolerate a -certain amount of confusion and anxiety and we should be able to help with that through therapy.” But when it comes to “the Tavistock’s gender identity service,” he says, “this work has not been done… the entire area has become unnecessarily politicised.”
It is undeniable that trans people have faced discrimination and abuse from those who don’t understand their experiences. A vocal rights lobby is quick to push back against transphobia—both real and perceived. Sometimes, though, legitimate challenges tip over into intimidation.
An American academic, Lisa Littman, encountered strenuous opposition when she published an article that coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” She lost a consultancy job, though remained an assistant professor at Brown University School of Public Health. Littman identified knots of socially-awkward girls drawn together in online chat rooms who reinforced each other’s self-diagnosis of being transgender before presenting to medical professionals. She had been led there by research involving the parents of some of these children, who had mentioned that their offspring had friends who also identified as transgender. (The US is experiencing a similar shift towards female transitioners, as are Finland, Canada and the Netherlands among others.) Along with Marcus Evans, Littman has pointed to a high incidence of autism and eating disorders among the same patients who present as trans. That observation raises some obvious questions about the narrowness of an approach that fixates on hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria.
The Tavistock pushes back against accusations that it is too quick to assume its patients are transgender and to provide hormones. “Our work with young people is not to affirm or deny,” they told me. “We respect children and young people’s sense of themselves and our assessment process considers gender identity development within the context of a psychological, biological, developmental and social framework, meaning that it is designed to give assessors a broad picture of the young person’s past and current gender identification.” Their work, they went on, is “cautious” and “considered” and whatever clinical interventions they do undertake are “laid out in nationally-set service specifications.” Hormone blockers are prescribed. But surgery cannot be performed until the age of 18.
In other words, due to peer pressure, young girls are being talked into doing this by not only their peers as the latest fad but by parents and doctors to quick to give them what they ask for.
There is a simple solution, the same one we use for alcohol and joining the Armed Forces! You can't take gender changing drugs and you sure as hell can't have surgery ( no matter how bad you think you want it ) till you are 18.
