Category: Health

  • Fancy that

    The UK isn’t the only country where there have been reviews into the effectiveness and safety of puberty blockers. And it’s interesting to see what such reviews conclude when they’re not created to deliver, and staffed by people promised a peerage if they deliver, a pre-determined conclusion to support a political goal. The latest such…

  • Enemies within

    The evangelical movement has spent a very long time practicing institutional capture, where it inserts its people into positions where they can enact its policies. And the same appears to be happening with the anti-trans movement here in the UK, with “gender-critical” people who reject the scientific and medical evidence increasingly inhaibiting positions where they…

  • Killer conspiracies

    The BBC reports that members of an “anti-establishment cult” have been jailed for trying to kidnap a coroner. What the BBC hasn’t clearly reported (and neither has The Guardian or The Telegraph, the latter of which devoted three pages to the case) is why they were doing it. They intended to enact a “death sentence”…

  • A brief history of torture

    There is a long and horrific history of conversion therapy being used against LGBTQ+ people, and we’ve known for a very long time that it’s dangerous, damaging quackery. This article by Mallory Moore is a good introduction and comes with a ton of content warnings; it describes some very awful things done by supposedly respectable…

  • The real trans healthcare scandal

    More than 200 trans people (that we know of) in the UK have been refused basic healthcare by their GPs, in many cases after years of receiving that healthcare. A new report (PDF) by TransActual goes into detail: in most cases it’s not that new requests are being refused; it’s that existing healthcare is being…

  • Spot the difference

    The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review…

  • Anatomy of a scandal

    This, by Lydia Polgreen, is superb: The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids. It’s about the Cass Review. As much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, nonbinary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in…

  • State-sanctioned harm

    Scientific American reports that the Cass Review has led to “a plethora of abuses and humiliations” for young trans people, which for some includes forced detransition. We estimate more than 1,000 trans adolescents in the U.K. now find that their treatment is illegal. Families risk an up to two-year prison sentence for supporting a child’s…

  • Cass: MMR all over again

    I think in years to come the Cass Review, and the media’s complicity, will be viewed in much the same way as Andrew Wakefield’s infamous MMR scare and its promotion by Private Eye and UK newspapers. Unfortunately like Wakefield, it will continue to harm people until and long after it’s been fully discredited and its…

  • Hypocrisy

    The Daily Mail, as I’m sure you’re aware, has spent many years now demonising “cross-sex hormones” and the people who take them for reasons such as not wanting to die. This is from tomorrow’s front page.