When I was 6 years old I realised I was supposed to be born a girl. This belief lasted until I was about 10 or 11. Lots of gay boys experience this. Of course, it turned out just to be my misunderstanding my future homosexuality.
If this bill were law today, and as a 6 year old I expressed to my parents (or anyone) the “realisation” that I was a girl in the wrong body, and if in response they CORRECTLY suggested “that’s just you misunderstanding your future homosexuality” and didn’t affirm my simplistic childish belief, their actions would be illegal. The test being my distress at the conversation (a conversation I most likely wouldn’t understand at 6).
This bill is a homophobic hellscape. It’s just awful.
How can its proponents not see the problem? exact parents they want
@JuliaHB1 🚨@JuliaHB1: "I think people like you should be in prison!"
Dr Helen: "You are again misgendering every single transgender boy out there..."
Part 2 of Julia Hartley-Brewer's clash with GenderGP's Dr Helen Webberley.
@JNHanvey Considering the era through which Dr.Cass practiced and trained - it is unusual and surprising to see her neither consider this diagnosis (MBP), and espouse the views she does here without considering safeguarding or child development.
Note to councils: if you want to learn about successful public transport (buses and trams) look to Edinburgh NOT Manchester as @andyburnham suggest. @on_lothianbuses best network in UK - and publicly owned!
If you grew up in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, or earlier, you may well be wondering: Where was my "gender identity" when I was a child?
The answer is simple: It wasn’t there.
The term "gender identity" was fabricated and popularised in the mid 1960s by psychiatrist Robert Stoller, primarily in the context of adult transsexual patients and intersex conditions. The extension of this concept to children came later, driven heavily by psychologist John Money’s work - much of which is now widely regarded as discredited and unethical.
For decades, "gender identity" remained a niche clinical idea applied mainly to adults. The notion that every child possesses an innate, potentially fluid gender identity that must be discovered and affirmed from a young age is a much later development, and a significant leap from the original theory.
"Gender identity" was developed as a narrow, niche adult oriented concept. And that context is exactly where it should have stayed.
An open letter to Baroness Cass ref the case of this child, whose situation needs to investigated by social services. This indeed is not a political matter but one of child protection.
https://t.co/XOTCtPq8tZ
Dear Baroness Cass,
I am writing in response to the case you described of the eleven year old boy socially transitioned by his parents at two and a half, now living stealth, afraid to attend school as either sex, and increasingly withdrawn and physically deconditioned as a result. I wanted to set out why I think this case illustrates something more specific than the question you posed about whether politicians or doctors should decide what happens to children like him.
The case is, on its own terms, a clear demonstration of premature identity foreclosure. A child of two and a half has no capacity for the kind of abstract, exploratory self reflection that genuine identity formation requires, on any developmental account from Piaget through Marcia. What happened to this child at that age was necessarily a decision made on his behalf and then sustained around him, not a discovery he himself reached. Bronfenbrenner's ecological model describes exactly the mechanism by which that early decision then becomes self perpetuating: once a social transition is established in the home, it is carried into school, peer relationships, and eventually clinical contact, each system reinforcing what the previous one had already settled, with no point at which the original premise is revisited. By the time this child reaches adolescence, an identity adopted before he could speak in full sentences has become something he now actively conceals and fears having questioned, which is a strange and telling outcome for an identity supposedly discovered rather than constructed.
The detail you raise of weakened bones from inactivity rather than from medical intervention is, I think, the most important part of the case, because it shows the harm operating through an entirely social pathway. A child too afraid of being outed to attend school is a child whose ordinary developmental environment, peer contact, physical activity, the everyday testing of self against the world that Erikson and Marcia both treat as necessary to identity formation, has been closed off by the position he has been placed in. This is not a side effect of any drug. It is the direct consequence of a foreclosed identity that has left him with nowhere safe to be a child.
I would push back on framing the central question as one of medical versus political authority over decisions like puberty blockers. The decision that produced the harm you describe was not a medical one at all. It was a parental and social decision taken years before any clinical pathway became relevant, and the clinical system he now exists within is managing the consequences of that earlier decision rather than the cause of his distress.
Given that he is now isolated, school avoidant, and showing physical signs of neglect of his basic developmental needs, I think it is also worth asking plainly whether this is a case that ought to have come to the attention of children's social services on ordinary safeguarding grounds, independent of any question about gender identity at all. I would suggest the more pressing question your case actually raises is what support and recourse exists for a child in his position now, given how early and how thoroughly the foreclosure already occurred, and what should change about how social transition in early childhood is approached so that fewer children arrive at eleven in a position this difficult to unwind.
Yours sincerely,
Two and a half. This unfortunate little boy was "socially transitioned" by his parents before he was three years old, and is now profoundly damaged, and terrified of being "outed" as the boy he is.
This is child abuse. It must stop.
What the parents have done to their son is unconscionable. They have destroyed his childhood in pursuit of an ideology.
He could not have understood to what he was "consenting," being far too young to understand what his sex let alone "gender identity" is.
The child does not need puberty blockers but to be removed from his cruel and abusive parents.
And Hilary Cass needs to do some reading up on child development. It is now clear that she believes that some children are born "trans". For a paediatric scientist, to publicly espouse that unevidenced belief, is beyond embarrassing.
@amscanlon Same..have you got a gel cooling mat? Our fur bag is hiding in the hall on hers, and missus has been coaxing her out the back garden to chuck a jug of water over her occasionally. Seems to be working but only mid 20s here 🐶🌊🌞
The Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides were erected sometime around 2900 to 2600 BC ..Pic + info c.o. The Scottish Bloodline .🏴
"Misconduct in public office" does not exist in Scotland but it does have wilful neglect of duty, about which a Scottish lawyer would have to advise.
Women prisoners wishing some easy money should however consult a lawyer & sue in The Great Scottish Prison Service Cash Giveaway.
So the Scottish Prison Service admits it has been acting unlawfully.
But says it will continue to break the law until it figures out how best to respond to the court’s ruling.
Have I read this right?