Hattifer

Concerned parent, worried woman

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

New laws in Afghanistan, introduced by the Taliban, mean that men can now marry girls at any age – there is no limit. Male relatives can arrange this with other men, and it’s only once the girls reach puberty that, in extremely limited circumstances, they can ask a court to dissolve the marriage. What’s happening in that country is horrific, and it begs the question why Amnesty are not putting all of their resources into tackling this latest child abuse atrocity.

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

Another helpful thread on the bill. Despite the government's assertion that it considers the draft bill compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, you can see its potential Article 8 issues from outer space.

https://t.co/0JLGBUTcck

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

Ideology in a lab coat

Hilary Cass's defence of the Pathways trial isn't just that "we need more data." It is that blocking puberty is justified as harm reduction, to stop children seeking drugs through "unregulated and dangerous routes."

But that defence already assumes what needs proving: that these children have a fixed gender identity correctly identified and worth affirming with hormones either way. Apply that construct to a child and you've made a category error before the trial even starts. More on this here....
https://t.co/LUkTqph8xm

[WDI.Afghanistan @WDIAfghanistan1]

🥳Sister Care🥳

A New Online Health & Wellbeing Initiative for Afghan Women and Girls🙏⬇️
https://t.co/VgmEKq8wjo

Please go to the substack link read or listen to our new initiative for Afghan women.
and please share your thoughts. Your feedback, suggestions, and even criticism are very important for us.
This is still the first version of the program, and we want to improve it based on your ideas before moving forward.
Once everything is finalized, we will create the GoFundMe link and take the next step together.
Thank you for your support and guidance.
Together, we can bring support, connection, and hope directly into their homes.

Thanks,
Yal

[SEEN in Publishing @SEENPublishing]

The new report from SEEN in Publishing @biologyinmed @Transgendertrd https://t.co/OoOALaXUhh
Key takeaways 🧵

[Maeve Halligan @MaeveHalligan]

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' - I'll tell the truth instead."

I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here:

[Hattifer @Hattifer1]

@BettsCaro @JournalistJill @akuareindorf Reminds me of the Inspiring the Future video in which schoolkids draw pics of firefighters/surgeons/pilots all as men - and are shocked to learn women do these jobs too. So depressing

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

https://t.co/kthaj84HDU

[Hattifer @Hattifer1]

@LBFlyawayhome That story gave me nightmares! I still remember thinking the sky was falling whenever there was a vivid sunset

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

Why Piaget matters: What the theorists never knew they were predicting (longish post)

"There is nothing more practical than a good theory" (Lewin)

The most striking thing about the developmental science relevant to gender identity in children is that none of it was written for this debate. Piaget, Kohlberg, Winnicott, Bowlby, Erikson, Bandura, Vygotsky. They were not responding to a culture war. They were not commissioned by a government review. They worked across incompatible theoretical traditions, competed with one another for primacy, and in several cases actively disagreed about fundamental questions of child development. What they share is that they were all doing something else entirely when they produced frameworks that turn out to be directly and uncomfortably relevant to what is happening in paediatric gender clinics right now.

That is not a rhetorical point. It is an evidential one. A framework developed independently, before the phenomenon it describes existed as a clinical category, and from within a tradition that had no stake in the outcome, carries a different kind of weight than research conducted after the debate was already politically charged. These theorists had no position on gender identity in children because the concept did not exist in its current form when they were writing. They were simply describing how children develop. And what they described does not support the central proposition of the affirmative model.

Piaget established that the cognitive capacities required for the gender identity claim as currently formulated, including abstract self categorisation, stable identity formation, and genuine understanding of long term consequences, are not present in pre-pubertal children. They emerge with formal operational reasoning in early adolescence at the earliest. A child cannot hold a fixed, considered understanding of a lifelong identity before the cognitive architecture for that kind of thinking exists. Piaget was not making a point about gender. He was mapping the stages of cognitive development. The implications for gender medicine follow whether he intended them or not.

Erikson established that identity formation is a developmental achievement of adolescence, not a pre-existing property of the child waiting to be uncovered. It requires a period of genuine moratorium, a phase of exploration, uncertainty, and provisional commitment, before a stable identity can be consolidated. A clinical model that offers certainty to young people in moratorium and rewards commitment while discouraging exploration does not support healthy identity development. It forecloses it. Erikson and Marcia called this identity foreclosure. They were describing a pathological outcome. The affirmative model produces it systematically.

Bandura and Vygotsky, again from entirely different traditions, established that identity narratives are transmitted through social learning and cultural mediation, and that internalised frameworks feel entirely self-generated and authentic even when they have been absorbed from the surrounding environment. This is not a trivial observation. It means that a child who has internalised a gender identity narrative through peer groups, online communities, and institutional affirmation will experience that identity as originating from within, as the most authentic thing about them, regardless of its actual origin. The felt authenticity of an identity is not evidence of its developmental validity. Bandura and Vygotsky established this decades before the current debate existed.

Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Fonagy, working across decades on attachment and mentalisation, established that presentations combining bodily alienation, identity disturbance, and severe mood disorder are characteristic of disorganised attachment and mentalisation failure. These are relational difficulties requiring relational responses. They were identifying a clinical profile long before that profile began appearing in gender clinics in large numbers. The profile they described and the profile now presenting to those clinics are, in a significant proportion of cases, the same profile interpreted through a different framework.

And then there is Winnicott. An identity formed under conditions of psychological distress and institutional reinforcement feels entirely authentic to the person living it. That felt authenticity is not evidence that the identity is the appropriate clinical focus. Winnicott established this in the middle of the twentieth century while treating children who had never heard the word transgender. He was not predicting the affirmative model. He was describing something more fundamental about how children under pressure construct selves that feel real, and what happens when those constructed selves are reinforced rather than gently explored.

The theorists did not know they were building the evidentiary case against a clinical model that would not exist for another half century. They were doing something more important. They were observing children carefully, over long periods, across cultures and contexts, and describing what they found with as much rigour as their methods allowed. The fact that their findings converge, from incompatible traditions, on a picture that raises serious questions about the affirmative model is not an accident of selection. It is what independent convergent evidence looks like.

This matters because the affirmative model has sometimes been defended on the grounds that the older literature simply did not anticipate the phenomenon and cannot speak to it. That defence does not hold. The older literature did not anticipate the specific clinical category. It did anticipate, with considerable precision, the cognitive limitations of pre-pubertal children, the dynamics of identity formation under social pressure, the relational origins of bodily alienation and identity disturbance, and the conditions under which constructed identities feel authentic while foreclosing genuine development. It predicted the shape of the problem without knowing the problem was coming.

That is what good theory does. And it is why the theorists who were never part of this debate may turn out to be its most important witnesses.

[Hattifer @Hattifer1]

@JournalistJill @BertDalziel Thanks for this - as mum to a teen daughter diagnosed at 12, gives me much to think about (as with Frith).

[Le_Sorelle_Arduino KPSS @Sorelle_Arduino]

Look at the absolute terror on @ZackPolanski ‘s face as @DrAmirKhanGP explains how women are let down by the medical industry which hasn’t studied our biology enough
Poor Polanski has no idea where this is going given he pretends a woman is just a feeling not biological reality

[Hattifer @Hattifer1]

@HormoneHangover Alison Jay’s beautiful picture books (eg Picture This/Counting) subtly reference fairy tales instead and my little one (now 17!) loved them. I still have them on the shelf.

[Hattifer @Hattifer1]

@helenlewis Interesting. My daughter was diagnosed at 12; there were lots of issues that seemed to suddenly hit us & we wanted an answer. Looking back maybe it was more nuanced

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

This is an excellent read on why it’s not possible to run an ethical puberty blockers trial.

[Larissa Phillips @larissaphillip]

Third piece in three days by the WSJ, this one mentioning all the greatest hits in this insane timeline.

- JKR, Jesse Singal, Jamie Reed, and all of their heroic, informed efforts.

- the shame of Science magazine, with “breezy inaccuracy” saying this protocol has been safely used since the 1980s;

- and the AAP assigning a group of activists the job of defining its policy,

-aand even John Oliver’s shameful comment that blocking puberty was just like “pressing pause on a remote control”.

This is so overdue and so satisfying to watch.

https://t.co/ooE6ygXz3w

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

A young detransitioner, Fox Varian, has won $2 million damages in a medical malpractice lawsuit, in which she sued the psychologist and surgeon who approved her for a double mastectomy, aged 16. Varian's mother testified that she'd been against the surgery, but was pressured into agreeing because she'd been told that unless her daughter transitioned she was likely to commit suicide.

As the floodgates open, and more and more detransitioners sue the clinicians who subjected them to an unregulated medical experiment, gender identity activists will almost certainly continue to ignore any evidence that fails to support their preferred narrative. They'll keep insisting that hardly any transitioned people regret their irreversible procedures, that gender clinicians know exactly what they're doing, that surgeries, cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are of proven benefit and that minors who're denied these treatments will to kill themselves. All of this is a lie.

Speaking at the WPATH conference in 2021, British endocrinology consultant Leighton Seal admitted 'we are doing procedures here where we don’t have outcome data.' A woman from Utah said she felt gender clinicians like her were making it up as they went along: 'Because I feel like we’re all just winging it, you know? And which is okay, you’re winging it too. But maybe we can just, like, wing it together.' (https://t.co/dW4xXKUzOY)

This will go down in history as one of the worst medical scandals of all time. Adults inside and outside the medical profession sold troubled young people like Varian the idea that all of their complex trauma would be resolved by removing healthy body parts.

As more and more detransitioners arrive in court, the public will learn the full extent of the harm done to kids in the name of an ideology. Clinicians performing these 'treatments' will go down in history as barbarous activists who betrayed a sacred oath: to do no harm. But we should never forget how many people outside the medical profession urged these young people on, gleefully assuring them that anyone advising caution was an evil bigot. There are people in elitist professions like publishing and academia, not to mention politicians and celebrities with young fan bases, who did all they could to champion the idea of gender identity, and kept pushing it even as the evidence of harm mounted. They're just as culpable as the clinicians. Too lazy to think more deeply than the fashionable mantras that got them social media likes, too arrogant to look at evidence from anyone outside their political bubble, they've slurred whistleblowers and attacked anyone with valid questions. In doing so, they've created a cultural climate without which this appalling tragedy could not have taken place.

Never forget, because only by learning the lesson can we stop this happening again.

https://t.co/6Z9rV8wI00

[Nick Wallis @nickwallis]

"There is no quality evidence to support the medical transition of a child. Period." Whistleblower @JamieWhistle explains.

[Mia Hughes @_CryMiaRiver]

The Tale of Two Contagions

In 2019, German psychiatrists observed a sudden surge of adolescent girls presenting to clinics with abrupt-onset Tourette-like tics. This immediately raised alarm bells. Tourette’s typically affects boys and begins in early childhood.

This was an entirely new patient population.

Researchers quickly identified the index case: Jan Zimmermann, a young Tourette sufferer, whose YouTube channel had recently exploded in popularity. The girls displayed the exact same symptoms as Jan: the same outbursts and catchphrases.

The phenomenon soon migrated to TikTok, where it spread like wildfire.

Researchers coined a new term for what they were observing: mass social media–induced illness — a modern iteration of the long-recognized phenomenon of mass sociogenic illness.

Yet, in 2014, when paediatric gender clinics across the Western world began to fill with adolescent girls — another entirely new patient population — “gender-affirming” clinicians didn’t even bother to look for the trigger.

And it wouldn’t have taken much effort to find. All it required was a glance at the cultural messaging of the time.

Because 2014 was the year Time magazine put Laverne Cox on its cover with the headline: The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.

And with that, the modern trans rights movement launched.

Trans-identified celebrities were everywhere, trans characters appeared in children’s books and television shows, trans influencers proliferated with astonishing speed online, and schools began teaching gender identity ideology as if it were scientific fact.

And in a perfect-storm scenario, smartphones and social media exploded in popularity, creating the ideal super-spreading environment for this seductive idea to go viral.

The message adolescents received was simple: If you hate your body, that could mean you’re trans.

And right on cue, legions of confused adolescents who hated their developing bodies began showing up at gender clinics believing themselves to be trans.

Just like the TikTok tics. A mass social media–induced illness.

Except on this occasion, instead of scrambling to contain the epidemic, doctors picked up their syringes and scalpels and set about permanently medicalising the innocent youth caught up in this powerful cultural storm.

And activists marched in the streets demanding that these young people be allowed to sacrifice their health, fertility, and body parts — while swiftly demonising anyone who dared point out the obvious parallels to social contagions of the past.

[Leor Sapir @LeorSapir]

A second doctor speaks out today.

“As a cardiologist, I am particularly alarmed by the cardiovascular risks these interventions pose to developing young hearts. Cross-sex hormones, such as estrogen in biological males or testosterone in biological females, are known to alter lipid profiles , increase blood clotting, and elevate the risk of thromboembolic events, stroke, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and hypertension. Multiple studies and reviews have documented these dangers: estrogen therapy may raise the likelihood of venous thromboembolism and ischemic events, while testosterone can worsen blood cholesterol and promote abnormal thickening of the heart muscle (cardiac hypertrophy). In adolescents, whose cardiovascular systems are still maturing, these effects could compound over a lifetime, potentially leading to premature heart disease���the leading cause of death worldwide.”