‘Transition’ Treatment Harms Kids, Veteran Psychiatrist at UK Gender Clinic Says
Children “have been very seriously damaged” in receiving treatment at the United Kingdom’s premier gender identity facility, a former psychiatrist there says in a bombshell interview.
Dr. David Bell faced disciplinary action after writing an internal report in 2018 raising concerns about procedures at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which operates the U.K.’s sole “Gender Identity Development Service.”
After working with Tavistock and Portman for 24 years as a consultant psychiatrist, Bell recently retired. In the interview with London-based Channel 4 News, he speaks openly about his observations about giving children puberty blockers, treating every girl with a gender or sexual issue as “conversion therapy,” and politicizing support for transgender children.
Right away, Bell isn’t shy about relating the concerns of parents and others about Tavistock’s treatment plans. He tells reporter Cathy Newman:
I was a representative of the clinical and academic staff. The concerns that were brought to me were very, very serious. The main concerns were issues that had to do with … lack of consent. Many of the people who spoke to me did not think their children were able to consent to the treatment.
Then there were concerns of children being inappropriately pushed through to transition, where they had a lot of complex problems that really needed thinking about. The whole attitude of what’s called ‘affirmation’ instead of neutrality and inquiry caused considerable damage to the capacity of the service and clinicians to take on the full complexities of the cases they were dealing with. As a result, children have been very seriously damaged.
Newman asks the psychiatrist in the interview whether children are at risk while receiving treatments at Tavistock.
Bell replies: “They’re less at risk now because the puberty blockers have been stopped. The puberty blockers have been stopped because there is no evidence base for them at all. … By putting them on that pathway, it rather becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
In December, a panel of three judges on the High Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling restricting Tavistock from issuing puberty blockers to children under 16. The High Court is one of the U.K.’s three senior courts under its Supreme Court.
The judges made their decision in part because of the testimony of Keira Bell, who is known in the U.K. for speaking out against the use of puberty blockers, which Tavistock prescribed to her when she wanted to become a male.
Channel 4’s Newman asks Bell about the High Court ruling in that case regarding kids under 16.
The psychiatrist calls the decision “really important because it acts to protect them.”
Bell later says that the “positioning of these girls as only having a gender problem acts to prevent them from developing in a normal way and their own nonconforming gender identity or sexuality” and adds: “This is a form of conversion therapy among people that are gay or lesbian.”
Newman asks Bell whether he “might be on the wrong side of history” in failing to be as vocally supportive of the transgender movement as one might expect from someone who worked at a gender clinic for decades.
He appears to have no qualms about tying the gender debate to politics, saying later that “one of the things gone terribly wrong in the Tavistock and elsewhere is the invasion of the clinical domain by the political ideology.”
Bell articulates the very phenomenon that has grown in the United States as well:
This is a very highly politicized area. And leaders from movements with a very powerful ideological commitment have managed to capture policy both medically, professionally, in the media, and in government with no evidence basis, a purely highly politicized movement; we just have these consequences.
All I’m saying … is [the children] need to wait. There needs to be a thoughtful engagement with them as opposed to motoring them through to treatment pathways that have irreversible consequences for their bodies. We’re talking about not doing harm to children.
Bell is at his most compelling when he discusses a real-life example of someone who is struggling with her sexuality.
“Let me put it very simply. A girl of 12 may find that she is sexually attracted to other girls,” Bell says, adding:
It may go through her mind: … Maybe I’m not a girl. Maybe I’m a boy. If that happened 10-15 years ago, that would have been a passing phase and things would have moved on. But now because of hugely changed cultural context and the penetration of social media, such a girl may go online and she may easily come to the belief … that she is a boy. And that having reached that [conclusion] … there will be lots of forces around her that will support it, and all her other difficulties will be repositioned through that prism.
Although Bell says he doesn’t believe that Tavistock tried to push him toward retirement or “hound him out,” he says the facility made it clear “that people like me that spoke out will come under the scrutiny in this very negative way.”
“I think it’s like a message to everyone else who don’t have my seniority, my safety: Oh, my God, I better not speak out, they’ll think I’m transphobic.”
Bell’s comments during this interview confirm that the High Court made the right decision when it ruled that Tavistock must stop giving puberty blockers to children under 16.
The psychiatrist’s articulations about gender ideology as a political movement, whether in the U.K. or the United States, are spot on. He was courageous to speak out on an issue that has become so controversial in such a short time.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene marks third anniversary of Parkland shooting by asking for more guns in schools - weeks after parents of victims called for her to resign over 'false flag' conspiracy theories
The Republican made the inflammatory comment after President Joe Biden called for a 'common sense' approach to gun reform as he commemorated the 17 lives lost in the massacre.
Greene wrote: 'Joe Biden had 30,000 armed guards at his inauguration, he clearly believes in good guys with guns. The best way to prevent school shootings is to repeal all gun free school zones and protect our kids like he protects himself.'
The 46-year-old has previously suggested that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were staged and has refused calls to resign over those comments.
It comes after Biden put out a statement saying his administration 'will not wait for the next mass shooting' before pushing forward legislation.
'We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer,' the president said on Sunday.
Parents of the children killed in the rampage last month demanded that Greene resign over her comments that the February 2018 massacre was staged.
In May of that year, she posted online a story about disgraced Broward County sheriff's deputy Scot Peterson - who ran away when the Valentine's Day shooting began - receiving a retirement pension.
In the comments section, someone wrote: 'It's called a pay off to keep his mouth shut since it was a false flag planned shooting.'
Greene replied: 'Exactly.'
Another commented: 'Kick back for going along with the evil plan. You know it's not for doing a good job.'
Greene responded: 'My thoughts exactly!! Paid to do what he did and keep his mouth shut!'
Gun rights activists frequently claim that school shootings are 'false flag' events, orchestrated by Democrats with paid actors, rather than real victims. They believe the scenarios are staged to spur gun control.
Relatives of the 17 students and staff killed in the massacre furiously demanded she resign, and David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting, called on her to apologize.
'Apologize Now or continue to spread these conspiracies and we will be sure to make the next 2 years of your life not only your last in Congress but a living hell as well,' he said.
He added they would 'also accept your resignation in place of an apology.'
Earlier this month, Democrats voted to remove Greene from her committee duties, in part due to these remarks.
Biden on Sunday said he wants Congress to pass laws that would require background checks on all gun sales and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The confessed school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, who was 19 at the time, was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and fired between 100 and 150 rounds in a rampage that killed 14 students and three adult staff at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Biden said Congress must also eliminate 'immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.'
Cruz was able to buy the assault rifle legally, despite having known mental health problems.
Even in a country that has grown inured to mass shootings and gun violence, the Florida shooting sparked outrage across the US and prompted fresh demands for firearms control.
But with Donald Trump in the White House and the Republicans controlling the Senate at the time, legislation approved by the Democrats in the House of Representatives went nowhere.
Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday said the House would try again.
'We will enact these and other life-saving bills and deliver the progress that the Parkland community and the American people deserve and demand,' she said in a statement.
Despite polls finding most Americans in favor of some sort of gun law reforms, successive US administrations have been powerless to pass legislation.
'The time to act is now,' Biden said.
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Americans Should Have the Freedom to Choose Their Medicines
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America spends $3.5 trillion a year to manage the symptoms of incurable diseases. The National Health Council estimates 133 million Americans suffer from a chronic illness, about one in three Americans.
If there is a better way to bring drugs to market sooner, why aren’t we using it? Perhaps we could mimic the model used during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) created an expedited process to approve drugs and treatment options for patients afflicted with the deadly disease. On May 21, 1990, the Public Health Service (PHS), the division of Health and Human Services under which FDA operates, announced in the Federal Register and sought public comments “on a proposed policy to make promising investigational drugs for AIDS and HIV related diseases more widely available under ‘parallel track’ protocols.” If we were able to create a pathway for AIDS drugs, we ought to consider extending this same model to other diseases.
Today, millions of Americans are suffering from debilitating and deadly diseases while potentially lifesaving drugs remain stuck in FDA’s approval bottleneck.
Currently, it takes on average 12 years and $2.9 billion to bring a drug from lab to patients. This is loo long and too expensive. As such, Americans are demanding a streamlined process to bring drugs to market. Because of FDA’s bloated bureaucracy and labyrinth approval process, there is an invisible graveyard of patients suffering and dying while treatments remain in efficacy trials for years. No one wants to discuss this awful truth, but it is necessary to enact real change.
FDA should act as a bridge to innovation, but often is a barrier. Too many resources are consumed when efficacy testing takes a decade to complete. We all want safe and effective drugs to come to market sooner, but when drugs have already been deemed safe by FDA they ought to be marketable to those who have exhausted all other options. The market will indeed respond if a drug is ineffective, just like it does in all other industries. Health care is no exception. Patients should be given the option to save their own lives, but government red-tape and nearly endless safety testing makes that impossible.
Free to Choose Medicine (FTCM) is a viable solution to this problem. In short, FTCM would expand upon the same expedited approval process used during the AIDS crisis.
FTCM would offer patients a sense of hope and by allowing drugs that have passed initial safety testing to be available to patients right away. Instead of the current FDA process, which would move that same drug to clinical trials where select patients suffering from said disease are offered a chance to get the drug, and then studied like lab rats, FTCM would inject commonsense into the antiquated drug approval process. Unfortunately, under the current system, half of patients in clinical trials are only exposed to a double-blind placebo. FTCM would do away with this as well.
It is unethical for FDA to offer sugar pills to patients who are dying, when a potential cure is available. If a drug is safe enough to offer to patients in clinical trials, it should be safe enough to offer to all patients suffering from the disease in question. Of course, patients should be aware that these unapproved medicines don’t have the FDA gold stamp of approval.
And doctors would play a vital role throughout the FTCM pathway, ensuring their patients are properly monitored throughout the duration of their treatment program.
FTCM puts patients in the driver’s seat of their own care. In America, patients and their doctors should make health care decisions, not FDA busybodies. In a nutshell, this is exactly what FTCM does. As Operation Warp Speed demonstrated, it is possible to expedite drug approval.
During the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. government put onerous FDA regulations aside in order to accelerate treatments and a vaccine. This commonsense approach, which is the core of FTCM, should be the norm, not the exception.
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UK: What’s really driving Labour’s patriotism problem
Not for the first time, I can’t work out which of Labour’s two warring factions is more tragic.
On one side you have the Starmerites, who are apparently convinced that sticking the Union flag on the Labour letterhead and mouthing some platitudes about patriotism is a surefire way to win back Red Wall voters. On the other, you have the left-wingers, formerly known as the Corbynistas, who seem to think doing so is not the cringey rebranding exercise that it is, but a sop to the forces of racism.
Indeed, Labour’s unending patriotism debate – sparked this week by an internal strategy presentation that was leaked to the Guardian – reminds us that for all Labourites’ infighting, when it comes to being woefully out-of-touch they are as one.
Patriotism has been a hot-button issue since Labour’s historic defeat at the 2019 election, in which it lost many of its former heartland seats in the Midlands and the North leading to its worst result since 1935. According to pollster Lord Ashcroft, Labour defectors at the last election lamented what they saw as then leader Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘lack of patriotism’.
This puts Corbyn and his party out of step with a clear majority of voters. A recent YouGov poll found that 61 per cent of the UK public say they are ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ patriotic. And for all the blather about patriotism being code for racism, many ethnic minorities don’t seem to have got the memo. As British Future director Sunder Katwala has pointed out, ethnic minorities tend to feel slightly more British than their white counterparts.
That British patriotism and national identity appear to be increasingly benign and ethnically inclusive phenomena makes the revulsion they provoke from certain Labourites even more absurd. One unnamed Labour staffer told the Guardian that watching the now-leaked patriotism presentation put him in mind of the recent storming of the US Capitol, and mad old Clive Lewis MP likened the strategy to ‘Fatherland-ism’.
Breathless reactions like this would lead you to believe leader Keir Starmer was being advised to go full-on blood-and-soil. In reality, the worst the presentation recommended was that he make ‘use of the [Union] flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly’. In response, Labour officials reportedly sent out edicts to ‘prioritise the Union Jack header images’ on promotional materials.
Where Starmer’s critics do have a point is in how cringey and inauthentic all this is. At the start of his leadership, Starmer said Labour should not ‘shy away from displaying national pride’ and touted himself as a patriot. Yet the statement his spokesperson has put out in response to the presentation leak this week is so hedgy that it has somehow been written up as both a defence of the strategy (in the Guardian) and a denial of it (in The Times).
Labour’s patriotism problem now seems baked in, despite the change of leadership. This is striking, given Labour’s most consequential leaders had no problem speaking its language, and patriotism today is not the carnival of imperial nostalgia some seem to think it is. The NHS, an institution closely associated with the Labour Party, often tops polls of what makes Britons most proud to be British. Still, routine chatter over the years about the need to carve out a modern, ‘progressive’ patriotism has never gone anywhere.
One can’t help but think that the real issue here is less Labour’s (obvious) discomfort with patriotism, and more its discomfort with ordinary people. The two at least are interlinked. As Labour has drifted away from working people, its ranks drawing more and more from the metropolitan middle classes, so it has become increasingly alarmed at the national identity which many of its former constituents still hold to.
The sacking of Emily Thornberry from the Labour frontbench in 2014, after she snobbily tweeted that photo of a house draped in the St George flag with a white van parked outside, reminds us that hysteria about nationalism goes hand in hand with plain old snobbery.
Starmer may not be as explicit as Thornberry, or the more hysterical Corbynistas, in his distaste for ordinary people. But as Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit secretary, and chief architect of his party’s second referendum policy at the last election, he did front Labour’s campaign to overturn millions of working-class people’s votes. He was the posterboy for a policy that basically said they were fools who shouldn’t be indulged.
The problem here isn’t so much that Labour hates this country — it’s that it hates the people who live in it.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/04/whats-really-driving-labours-patriotism-problem/
******************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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