Last month, Britain’s National Health Service made major news when they announced that they were banning the use of puberty blockers for children, except for those enrolled in a tightly regulated clinical trial. The decision was made after an independent review found there were “significant uncertainties” surrounding the long-term effects of these drugs, which had previously been touted as totally reversible.
The announcement followed another major decision that the NHS made last year on the same subject, which was to close Britain and Wales’ only treatment center for children with gender dysphoria: the Tavistock Gender and Identity Service. The NHS found that the care provided at Tavistock, which has operated for nearly 35 years, was “not safe or viable as a long-term option for the care of young people with gender related distress.”
These decisions bring the UK in sync with countries like Sweden and Norway—which have also made similar policy decisions when it comes to gender care for children. But all of those countries seem light-years away from how the United States approaches these issues.
My guest today, Hannah Barnes, has reported on this topic for years. Indeed, her reporting was the catalyst for many of these new changes. She’s here to explain what happened in the UK, and why the U.S. is so out of step with one of our strongest allies.
Hannah is an award-winning investigations producer at Newsnight, one of the BBC’s flagship news programs. Her new book, Time To Think, follows the story from Tavistock’s inception to its imminent closure. It investigates how a clinic can open its doors to thousands of young patients at their most vulnerable, how it can operate for more than three decades without oversight or regulation, and how—in the words of some of the clinic’s own staff—this “medical scandal” unfolded.
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I really appreciated this episode. But I will say I'm running out of patience with the Left. I come from the Left and I did the nuance dance for a long time. I feel like it's a Churchill vs. Chamberlain situation. Are you going to be able to adequately explain to young people whose testicles and breasts have been removed, whose sexual function is non-existent that you just didn't want to be associated with the "right wingers" and their transphobia? I don't either but I also understand that they have no problem stepping in and protecting children. Why doesn't the Left? Why is everyone so concerned about how they will be perceived?
Is there an overarching principle with which to understand the social changes we are now experiencing? Perhaps social media is the revolutionary technology that the printing press once was. The transfer of information, crowd-shaming, and outraged self-righteousness can now be transmitted with viral stealth. This immediacy leaves little time to distill visceral impulses into insightful illuminations. So many mouths talk before they think. Roberts Rules of Order simply do not work in our current social discourse.
I have been a psychiatrist for over thirty years. I belong to the bridge generation: those classically trained to appreciate the subtleties and nuances of the dynamics of human behavior and the growing body of scientific literature describing the neurochemistry which determines mood, temperament, and intellectual prowess. The desired verity of the science as it develops is held in question by collusion with the vested financial interests of industries such as pharmaceuticals and cannabis. It is increasingly hard to trust or believe in any purported expert or thought leader. The debates are a cacophony of vitriol and sophistry.
When Ideology Corrupts Medicine__and How One Reporter Exposed It is another brilliant Honestly podcast discussion. Over the last decade, I have quietly seen many children led by the trans cultural revolution into biological and surgical interventions to further overt late onset gender dysphoria. The wrath of trans activists has come down upon multiple thought leaders and academics, and anyone who notes the absence of mathematically sound settled science is threatened with loss of career or livelihood. We are witnessing the censorship of academic freedom, as evidenced by the woke inquisition’s response to Dr. Lisa Littman’s concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria, ROGD (Is she still at Brown?). We have allowed trans activist to own the narrative when there should be respect debate and discussion. The demand to validate every assertion of trans identity has its own characterological underpinning. A macroscopic lens on this debate would concur with the points made in this podcast that the great majority of the gaggle of ROGD has relevant co-morbidities. The question that should be asked whenever there are multiple psychiatric co-morbidities is whether there an organizing umbrella diagnosis to explain the cooccurrence co-morbidities: developmental trauma, borderline personality disorder, autism, and social contagion can all be underlying conditions which cooccur with ROGD; all of these conditions share the condition of identity diffusion. It is noteworthy that borderline personality disorder is rarely diagnosed as it is considered sexist and pejorative. To suggest that ROGD may stem identity diffusion from any of these other diagnoses can be tantamount to admitting bias, transphobia, or even hatred, when in fact the very rage of such an accusation may actually be a group endorsed distortion. To disagree is to be transphobic and hateful. I am relieved that some on the left can agree with some on the right over rational issues that she not be politicized. We should be addressing social contagion as the process to identify and contain.