UK: Transgender children can now get puberty-blocking drugs without the need to go to court

I must admit I have gotten depressed from the way TERFs and other transphobes has managed to slow down the progress trans and queer people have made in Britain.

But there is good news today.

Previously the High Court has forced trans kids to go to a judge to get access to puberty blockers (which was in itself a huge step backwards). Now they say that parental consent is enough.

“i” writes:

Transgender children can get puberty-blocking drugs without the need to go to court as long as their parents agree to the treatment, a High Court judge has said.

The family of a 15-year-old transgender girl, identified only as XY, had sought clarity after the same court last year found that under-16s are incapable of giving their consent for hormone blockers, which delay the onset of puberty.

The NHS Gender Identity Development Service, run by the Tavistock and Portman Trust, had initially concluded that if patients cannot give their consent to the treatment, a court order must be sought on every occasion in which the drugs are used.

Mermaids UK writes:

To be clear, the court has decided that there is no obligation for families or clinicians to apply to court to authorise the prescription of puberty blockers, if parents or carers have given legally valid consent to treatment. As with any other medical treatment, that is the case unless there is a dispute between parents or a concern by the clinician that the parents are not able to give free and informed consent themselves. This will only affect a tiny minority of cases.

In related news:

British transgender people will be protected under plans to ban conversion therapy, the equalities minister has said.

Photo: Redbubble

Lesbian Baroness, Elizabeth Jean Barker, debunks transphobic arguments in powerful speech

Pink News reports on the speech of the lesbian British peer, Baroness Parker, in defense of an inclusive Maternity Bill. She used the opportunity to tell her peer’s the truth about transphobia.

A Labour politician, Lord Hunt, has used the House of Lords to rage against the trans-inclusive language found in the proposal.

Parker is a Liberal Democrat.

According to Pink New the baroness said this in the House of Lords (the upper chamber of parliament):

“The classic campaign identifies a minority group, preferably one about which the majority population knows little, ascribes to them characteristics and motivations which make them a threat, repeats those assertions, preferably with the backing of a neutral body of experts, over and over until they become received wisdom. It’s what happened to migrant communities in the UK in the 1970s, and in the 1980s it was lesbians and gay men. Today, it’s the turn of trans people.“

“They [the alt-right] support campaign groups and individual academics to produce those documents which look like research, but under closer inspection, they’re just the same dodgy dossiers as in the past.”

“If you closely examine [Lord Hunt’s] speech, there is no actual evidence of any threat by trans people to individual women or women’s rights. It’s just an opinion, admittedly widely repeated”

"As a woman who lived through Section 28 [Margaret Thatcher’s homophobic legislation], I know what it’s like to be portrayed as a member of a group that constitutes a threat to women and children and families.”

“[It was] unsafe to let us [lesbians] into changing rooms because we pose a threat – all without evidence. That was an expression of classic homophobia, often expressed in the exact same arguments and phrases we’re hearing today. The effect of what you’re proposing is the same.”

Baroness Barker also talked about “gender-critical” trans-exclusionary feminists who are now supporting Hunt’s anti-trans amendment. She ridiculed their refrain of being “silenced” by the media, which is repeated by that same media “week in, week out”.

“They’re not being silenced, it’s just that some of us have the temerity to disagree with them, and to call them out for what they’re doing.”

Bravo, baroness, bravo!

Official portrait of Baroness Barker by Roger Harris

Actor Graham Norton says trans people must be protected, not feared

Graham Norton is an Irish television and radio presenter, comedian, actor, author, and commentator, known also for his work in Britain. Trans people in the UK have taken note of his strong support for them.

Pink News reports:

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Graham Norton compared Twitter to a “24-hour pub brawl”, and said: “I feel like trans people are a very vulnerable group and a tiny group, and it’s been conflated into this thing, as if there are trans armies coming over the hills.”
He emphasised that trans people “need to be protected, rather than feared” and, referencing the increasingly hostile discourse surrounding trans rights in the UK, added: “Any group looking for equality and progress will only get there if there’s an ‘extremist’ vanguard, and that’s how you shift things to the middle ground.”
Norton recently admitted he missed out on being part of the vanguard who “fought for tolerance in Ireland”, saying that he “took the easy way out” by moving to London.
More here!

Photo from BBC

International Health Organizations Support Treatments for Transgender Kids

The directors of multiple medical organisations that study transgender health and gender dysphoria have released a joint statement calling for the UK Bell vs Tavistock High Court decision in the United Kingdom to be appealed.

The High Court has made it hard for transgender kids to get access to puberty blockers. The blockers give transgender children time to consider their gender identities without having the hormone rush of puberty change their bodies before they are old enough to make a final decision regarding their gender identity.

On December 1, 2020, the London High Court ruled that children are unable to consent to taking puberty blockers. All applicants for gender affirming medical intervention in the UK under the age of 16 must first seek authorization from a court to be able to access puberty blockers.

The Boards of Directors of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the European Association for Transgender Health (EPATH), the United States Professional Association for Transgender health (USPATH), the Asian Association for Transgender Health (AsiaPATH), the Canadian Association for Transgender Health (CPATH), the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), and the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) all strongly disagree with the judgment.

They write:

Treatment of transgender adolescents involving gender affirming medical interventions (puberty suppression and subsequent gender affirming hormones) is the most widely accepted and preferred clinical approach in health services for transgender people around the world.
The aim of puberty suppression is to prevent the psychological suffering which stems from undesired physical changes that occur during puberty, and to allow the adolescent time to carefully consider whether or not to pursue further transition when they are eligible.
It is part of the two main international guidelines: the WPATH’s Standards of Care as well as the Endocrine Society’s Clinical Practice Guidelines. To be effective, this treatment must commence early in the puberty process, not at the age of 16. When treatment is needed, its effectiveness will be diminished while waiting to be seen by a court of law…
We have a grave concern that the High Court has overlooked not only the immediate positive effects of puberty suppression, which has been demonstrated to result in decreased psychological suffering and a healthier adolescent development, but also the lifelong benefits of having a physical appearance which is congruent with one’s gender identity.
Withholding such treatment until adolescents are 16 years old means they will experience complete puberty incongruent with their gender identity, which has potential life-long harmful consequences such as stigmatization, personal physical discomfort, difficulty with sexual function and social integration.

The court’s decision is just one in a long line of attempts to stop trans and queer youth from becoming themselves and live happy lives. These people pretend that they care for trans kids, but their main objective is to force these kids to accept their assigned gender and live up to the binary. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that this policy has no support among health professionals who know something about gender dysphoria and transgender people.

You can read the whole statement here.

Illustration by Arusyak Pivazyan

A Majority of British Women Support Transgender People’s Right to Identify as Their Chosen Gender

Pink News report on a new YouGov poll in Britain:

A massive 57 per cent of women surveyed by YouGov for PinkNews agreed that trans people should be able to self-identify as their chosen gender, compared with 43 per cent of men from an overall sample of UK adults.
Only 21 per cent of women said they were against trans people self-identifying, compared with 33 per cent of men.
On the whole, 50 per cent of the UK population surveyed said they were in favour of trans people self-identifying, compared with just 27 per cent who said they opposed. Twenty-three per cent of respondents said they did not know how they felt about trans people being able to self-identify.

Keep in mind that an unholy alliance of right wing extremists and trans-exclusionary radical feminists have campaigned for years now to invalidate and exclude transgender people in Britain. I am sure their campaign has had an effect. Still, they have not succeeded in turning the majority of the Brits against transgender and nonbinary people, and I am glad to say that the TERFs have failed miserably in their attempts at setting cis women up against trans women.

The bad news is that a majority of Conservative voters is against self-identification, and the Conservative government might take that into consideration when deciding on new policies. The British Conservative party used to be a pro-trans party, but since Boris Johnson took over, that can in no way be taken for granted.

Still, all in all, this poll is good news.

UK Conservative Prime Minister Supports Trans People

For American readers this may come as a surprise, but in Europe Conservatives are quite often supporters of transgender rights. This also applies to Britain, in spite of its TERFs and transphobic right wingers.

Mercedes Allen refers to Pink News over at twitter.

In Norway a Conservative gay, married, minister of health recently changed regulations, making it possible for trans people to correct their legal gender online, all by themsleves, and without intervention from the medical community.

More than half of Brits support trans people self-identifying their gender, despite recent protests

Nearly 60 per cent of people also support children being taught about LGBT+ issues in schools

The Independent

More than half of Brits are in favour of transgender people being able to self-identify despite protests from some anti-trans groups, according to a new poll. The UK TERFs and rigth wing extremists have failed.

Opinion | How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans

The New York Times has an interesting article about why so many British feminists appear to be transphobic haters (while the American TERFs are a dying breed).

Sophie Lewis writes:

“[TERFs] Ms. Parker and Ms. Long may not know it, but they’re likely influenced by the legacy of the British “Skepticism” movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, which mobilized against the perceived spread of postmodernism in English universities as well as homeopathy and so-called “junk science.” Hence, the impulse among TERFs to proclaim their “no-nonsense” character; witness the billboard Ms. Parker paid to have put up last fall dryly defining a woman as an “adult human female.” Such a posture positions queer theory and activism as individualistic, narcissistic and thus somehow fundamentally un-British.
It’s also worth noting that the obsession with supposed “biological realities” of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it’s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)
But perhaps the biggest factor in the rise of TERFism has been the relative dearth of social movements in Britain over the past three decades. It’s telling that Ms. Parker thinks it was the United States that exported “political correctness” and ideas like “gender identity” to Britain; it might even be fair to say that she’s right.
In other parts of the world, including America, mass movements in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s around the effects of globalization and police brutality have produced long overdue dialogue on race, gender and class, and how they all interact. In Britain, however, the space for this sort of dialogue has been much more limited.”

So the reason these so-called “radical feminists” appears to be deeply conservative haters, is because that is the kind of thinking they have grown up with. Note that most of them are white, middle class, women, with little knowledge of marginalized groups beside their own.

So it should come as no surprise that Master TERF Posie Parker recently took part in an event arranged by the American right wing extremist Heritage Foundation.

Reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004

sixweekoldhedgehog:

I figured I’d put this in its own post for ease of reblogging.
This is an official UK government consultation on making it easier for transgender people to get legal recognition.
It includes, among other things:
should non-binary identities be legally recognised
should dysphoria & medical transitioning be removed from the requirements for gender recognition
what more can be done for intersex people
access to sex-specific public facilities for transgender people
The consultation closes at 11pm on 19 October 2018. Please read and respond if it affects you or if you are an ally.
Please share this post to get the word out.

This consultation from the UK Department of Education seeks your views on how best to reform the process of changing one’s legal gender. The British government wants to make it easier for people to change their legal gender.

The Government Equalities Office underlines that:

“Trans people already have the right to legally change their gender, and there is no suggestion of this right being removed. This consultation simply asks how best government might make the existing process under the Gender Recognition Act a better service for those trans and non-binary people who wish to use it.”

Relevant UK background papers here.

Online survey here.

To make the process of filling in the online consultation easier, the department recommends first downloading and reading the full consultation document (PDF), before starting the online survey. Easy to read version here.

UK faces renewed calls to end 'humiliating' gender recognition process

A coalition of trans activists, LGBTI organizations and human rights groups have penned an open letter to the new British minister for Women and Equalities, Penny Mordaunt (pictured).

The letter calls on Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt, who has been in the role for just over week, to prioritize a consultation on the Gender Recognition Act (GRA).
The consultation would potentially give adults the right to change gender without a doctor’s approval. It’s been put back by successive ministers for Women and Equalities since autumn last year.

More here!