Last week saw two significant developments in the debate over the treatment of trans-identifying children and young people – the release in Britain of the final report of Dr Hilary Cass’s review into gender healthcare, and here in New Zealand, the news that the Ministry of Health has contracted trans lobbyists PATHA (Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa) to update our own guidelines for the care of gender confused youth.
Minister for Youth and Mental Health Matt Doocey was interviewed about it on radio, accompanied by Labour MP Megan Woods. I cannot ever recall two MPs from different sides of the House literally going along together to sing from the same song sheet to the media.
“We know that suicide rates for our young people from our rainbow communities are incredibly high…” said Woods. Doocey chimed in that they were indeed “over-represented in our suicide statistics.” This lie has been used by partisan health professionals for years to terrify parents into transing their children, and it is entirely discredited. Matt Doocey should know this, since the Gender Identity Service at the Tavistock Clinic – where he used to work – has stated, “suicide is extremely rare.”
Even the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has rejected the suicide trope. Its former Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee, Dr Laura Edwards-Leeper, has said,
“As far as I know there are no studies that say that if we don’t start these kids immediately on hormones when they say they want them that they are going to commit suicide. So that is misguided … in terms of needing to intervene medically to prevent suicide and doing it quickly, I know of no studies that have shown that.”
Trans-identifying youth do commit suicide at higher rates than the general population, but only at the same rate as other young people with mental health difficulties.
Both Doocey and Woods were waving the suicide myth around for its usual purpose – to shut down debate. “Young people will be watching us,” they cried. “We need to be careful of this debate because people are injecting very different views into it,” Matt Doocey said. But not National or Labour, whose MPs are clearly determined to present a united front in the face of “very different views.”
(For those who have just arrived at this crime scene, the Cass Report is a damning indictment of the gender affirming approach, written by Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in the UK. Parents, whistle-blower clinicians, and de-transitioners all over the world have been waiting four years for this world-first, government-commissioned, evidence-based, large-scale study of transgender medicine by a clinician with impeccable credentials. It has confirmed everything we were told we were bigots for knowing and seeing. The Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal has written in response to the report, “The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research question you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment.”)
Megan Woods inadvertently revealed who she is listening to by repeating PATHA's press release about the Cass report. She claimed that the report had not consulted any transgender clinicians and used PATHA’s exact analogy to dismiss this landmark research – that no one would give credit to a study on women’s health that didn’t consult women, so why should we pay any attention to this? But if she had read the report, she would know that the reviewers, “prioritised input from … clinicians and other professionals with responsibility for providing care and support to children and young people within specialist gender services and beyond.” (pg.26).
The nonsense goes on and on, but the most important part of the interview comes when Matt Doocey says, “What I want to be very clear about – we should be having gender affirming healthcare where we’re supportive of people and are inclusive.”
The gender affirming approach involves immediately “affirming” someone when they claim a trans identity, regardless of their age or mental state. It involves agreeing that they are indeed trapped in the wrong body, helping them change their names, pronouns, presentation, and then supporting them through extreme body modification, destroying their fertility and condemning them to a lifetime as medical patients, absolutely and without question. And in New Zealand there is no need for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria – that would be pathologizing. Our medical professionals trust children and teenagers to have a fixed identity and know it. This flies in the face of all child development understanding and completely disregards child safeguarding. That is gender affirming healthcare and that it is what the Cass Report has demolished. Meanwhile in New Zealand, it remains the law - the Conversion Practices Prohibition Act made it illegal for medical professionals to take a questioning approach.
People whose lives have not been touched by this insanity assume we are exaggerating, imagining it, have gone down a rabbit hole, because it is inconceivable not only that it is true, but that the Minister for Youth and Mental Health is determined to defend and perpetuate this social contagion and a global medical scandal.
And it is the grown-ups who have lost their minds. There are trans activists at every level of New Zealand’s health services and government. This would be concerning for any issue, but in support of medical quackery it is extremely dangerous. By contracting PATHA to write the new guidelines for gender healthcare, due in August this year, the Ministry of Health has shown us that they are digging in. It’s like giving the tobacco lobby the contract for Quitline.
Full credit to Ruth Hill at Radio New Zealand for bringing the PATHA contract to light. It is the first news story on the medicalisation of children I'm aware of since her last about 18 months ago. Who knows what she might tell us if RNZ (and other newsrooms) let their staff do their jobs?
Citizen Science is a pseudonym