Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Health

Scare stories and newspaper nonsense

  • Corruption and collusion

    Freedom of Information requests have revealed collusion between the Department of Health and Social Care and anti-trans groups:

    The correspondence shows Sex Matters, LGB Alliance and Transgender Trend manoeuvring their way into government as so-called “stakeholders” on trans policy, despite lacking any medical expertise and spreading narratives that misrepresent science, misuse human rights law, and dismiss the lived realities of trans people.

    It’s not just emails or letters. The documents show meetings arranged, consultations granted, suicide statistics disputed, and legal rulings twisted into tools to attack trans healthcare. While trans people themselves were left out of the room, ministers were treating hostile lobby groups as if they spoke for the public.

    There’s much more but the DHSC is trying to hide it behind freedom of information exemptions.

    This is not neutral “stakeholder engagement”. It is collusion with groups intent on dismantling the rights of others. And it is happening in secret — behind FOI exemptions, closed consultations, and redactions — while trans communities are left paying the price with their lives.

  • A tsunami of scaremongering

    There’s a good piece in Assigned Media: “A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream. It’s about the US but relevant to the UK too: our media is just as captured, and their reporting is helping the right-wing attacks on trans people’s human rights and healthcare.

    It takes one pseudoscience peddler and uses their activities to show:

    “the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.

    This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.”

  • Home is where the hate is

    One of the anti-trans groups favoured by health minister Wes Streeting is the Bayswater Support Group, some of whose members advocate child abuse in order to make children “accept biological reality”. And in a new, heartbreaking report by Trans Safety Network, some of those kids describe how the group radicalised their parents into increasingly cruel behavior and opened the door for far-right extremism.

    A very familiar pattern emerges: increasing alienation, paranoia, cruelty and conspiracism as people get drawn deeper into radicalisation and further from reality.

  • A public health crisis

    A new report in the International Journal for Equity in Health says that transphobia in the UK is causing a public health crisis.

    The paper identifies multiple issues: limited or non-existent access to appropriate healthcare; social exclusion; policy-driven discrimination; and “minority stress”, which leads to adverse health outcomes including cardiovascular disease and risk behaviours such as alcohol use.

    The authors say that the health disparities faced by trans and gender-diverse people in the UK constitutes “a real-time public health crisis that demands urgent and sustained intervention.”

  • Inconvenient truth

    One of the hallmarks of the genital-obsessed weirdo movement is to claim that there’s not enough research about trans healthcare, and to then ignore any research about trans healthcare because it doesn’t support their lurid claims. And there’s a great example of that in Utah where the Republicans commissioned a Cass-style report to justify their ban on trans healthcare but forgot to put a bigot in charge.

    The result? The evidence shows that trans healthcare is effective and safe and that bans cause great harm.

    It’s very detailed – much more so than the Cass Review – and as The Advocate reports:

    “The conventional wisdom among non-experts has long been that there are limited data on the use of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] in pediatric patients,” the researchers wrote. “However, results from our exhaustive literature searches have led us to the opposite conclusion.” The study found over 230 primary studies involving 28,056 trans youth — “far exceeding” the evidence that typically supports FDA approval for high-risk pediatric treatments, including gene therapy.

    “The body of evidence we have uncovered exceeds the amount of evidence that often serves as the basis of FDA approval for many high-risk, new drugs approved in pediatric populations in the U.S.,” the authors added.

    The report emphasized that such treatments are not given to prepubertal children, that puberty blockers and hormones are typically initiated only in early or mid-adolescence, and that surgeries — especially bottom surgeries — are not recommended for minors. The review also found no significant long-term safety concerns, and that “regret” associated with treatment is extremely rare. In fact, among the 32 studies examining regret, researchers found it was “virtually nonexistent” — and when present, it was “only a very minor proportion” of treatment discontinuation.

    The response, from politicians and national press alike, has been to ignore it.

    As I’ve written before, the problem isn’t that we don’t have evidence. It’s that the evidence doesn’t say what the genital-obsessed weirdos want it to say, so they discount it, distort it or ignore it. They’re not interested in the truth. They just want to hurt trans people.

  • Don’t get sick. Don’t get old

    One of the things that really scares me is getting old – not because I’m scared of ageing, but because unless I die first I’ll eventually need to enter the care system. The care system in the UK is horrific for most, and there are extra terrors for LGBTQ+ people – so much so that many UK care homes believe they have no LGBTQ+ residents, as those residents have chosen not to reveal their sexuality or gender history for fear of discrimination or worse.

    Writing in Yorkshire Bylines, Nell Stockton explains the additional fears caused by the anti-trans Supreme Court verdict and subsequent EHRC misinformation.

    The short version: it’s an absolute shitshow that could do serious damage to older trans people’s lives, their health and their safety.

    All of us will hopefully get to live to a ripe old age. Trans older adults deserve to enjoy their later years as much as anyone, without fear of being outed and shunned, and we should not be forced into becoming recluses.

  • Cass, peer reviewed

    A new peer review of the Cass report yet again shows that it was a political exercise designed to rubber-stamp the government’s war on trans people and our healthcare. The report’s conclusion is damning:

    Our critical analysis reveals significant methodological problems in the commissioned systematic reviews and primary research that undermine the validity of the Cass report’s recommendations. During our review of the report and supplementary primary research, we found insufficient statistical rigor, unreliable datasets, claims presented without evidence, and misrepresentation of quotes from primary research participants.

    Cass should have been struck off for this. Instead, she was given a peerage.

  • Basic biology

    The bigots are furious with doctors who dare to challenge their primary school-level understanding of human biology. Resident doctors of the British Medical Association approved a motion yesterday that called the Supreme Court verdict – which repeatedly used the term “biological women” but seemed unable to say what that actually meant – “scientifically illiterate” and “biologically nonsensical”.

    The anti-trans groups have of course lied about what the motion said, claiming that doctors said there was “no basis” for biological sex. But that’s not what the text said. It said:

    We recognise as doctors that sex and gender are complex and multifaceted aspects of the human condition and attempting to impose a rigid binary has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender diverse people.

  • The Brexit of healthcare

    Another day, another demonstration that the Cass report into puberty blockers was a political move, not a medical one.

    As the epidemiologist and writer known as Health Nerd posted to Bluesky, “The BMJ journal Archive of Disease in Childhood has just published the epidemiological study done by York university that was commissioned as part of the Cass review into gender clinics in the UK. It contains some startling (and yet, unsurprising) revelations… this report undermines most if not all of the Cass review recommendations regarding clinical care.”

    The study found that gender dysphoria diagnoses were incredibly uncommon; that a tiny proportion of those studied were prescribed any medication; and rates of prescribing were falling, not rising.

    Elsewhere, solid criticisms of the Cass report continue to be published. This piece in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health describes it as the Brexit of health care and notes that “it is very unusual in the history of medicine that a time-honoured treatment, with a good safety record, even if based on non-randomised trials and experts’ opinion, is simply banned”.

    You can find a very comprehensive collection of links to Cass-related studies and commentary on Ruth Pearce’s website here.

  • A broken system

    Abigail Thorn, actor and writer of Philosophy Tube, posted a video two years ago about her (awful) experiences of the NHS. The short version: she demonstrated how the NHS is institutionally discriminatory towards trans people. So I imagine she was quite surprised when a very senior NHS figure approached her about being the face of a new campaign about changes in NHS trans provision.

    Thorn said no, and has written an article explaining why. Thorn is the first to say that there are some very good people working in the NHS, and in trans care specifically. But the organisation itself is broken, and treats trans people appallingly. And it’s getting worse.

    I’m writing this in my sixth month of having my basic healthcare refused by my GP, healthcare that the GP happily provides to dozens of cisgender people but which is apparently too difficult to provide to me. I’m a few months away from finally getting surgery I first asked to be referred for six years ago, a referral that was never made because the gender clinic doctor simply didn’t bother doing it, a mistake or deliberate omission that I didn’t find out about for two years. My next referral was delayed because the gender clinic made an appointment for the mandatory second opinion, never told me about the appointment, and then concluded that I had changed my mind about wanting referred because I didn’t attend. Another year gone.

    So it’s fair to say I’m sympathetic to Thorn’s argument.

    There are many problems with NHS care for trans people, and they’re about to get worse with a Cass-style stitch-up labelled as a review of adult care. That review isn’t going to recommend that the NHS does something about the infiltration of conversion therapists, or the humiliating assessments we have to go through, or the woeful lack of staff, or the waiting lists that mean many trans people will die before even having a first assessment. And it’s not going to do anything about making trans people’s access to care any easier, because as Thorn points out:

    every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

    …I agree with others who study this field that consultations and “stakeholder meetings” have become a form of abuse by the NHS and the government: we’re included nonperformatively – given time to speak in order to legitimise the process of ignoring us.

    In years to come, this will rightly be viewed as a scandal. But it’s going to harm many more people before that happens.