Recently I wrote Information Can Be Both Factually True and Very Misleading. If social media and highly politicized communications existed in the 1940s when antibiotics were introduced, many parents would have shied away from antibiotics just as they do covid vaccines, based on information that was technically “true” but also misleading.
I honestly don’t understand your objections very well, although I’m truly trying to understand.
My statements about antibiotics (in the other post) were a thought experiment. They were not intended to make factual claims about antibiotics (other than “used appropriately, antibiotics cure infections, save lives, and prevent bad long-term outcomes of untreated bacterial infections, so a parent would be foolish to reject them out of hand”).
That’s hardly a controversial view. Nor did I intend anyone to understand it to mean “antibiotics are always good for every ailment.” That would be quite silly.
The point was, many parents would be frightened by the (true but small) dangers of antibiotics, which are arguably greater than the (true but small) dangers of the covid vaccines, if antibiotics were introduced today with similar scare-mongering tactics as we see with the vaccines.
I stand by my points that true information can be at times misleading (the previous post) and false information can be misleading (this post).
I stand by my opinion that if there’s a problem you cannot solve yourself, if you want to maximize your overall outcomes in life you will do well to listen to reputable, credible experts.
A doctor, for example, will know better than a plumber when taking antibiotics would be safe and appropriate for your child or not.
The pediatrician who’s always looked after your child will know better than a random person on Twitter claiming to be a doctor about what treatments or vaccines your child needs.
That does not mean listening to experts is an infallible approach. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be pleased with the result. That doesn’t mean that you must suspend your own critical thinking.
It just means you’re probably better off believing a credible doctor who’s studied the treatment (whether antibiotics or vaccines) than a person on Twitter who posts a chart of true but misleading information from CDC.
These are not at all wild or controversial claims! It’s something, though, which some people might not have considered before or thought about -- ie, that they might be so frightened by information that might factually be true (but misleading) that they make bad choices.
There’s a place for “common sense” to be sure. That’s similar to “trusting your gut.” We are in agreement about common sense.
However, often common sense without expertise is wrong -- just as a plumber might think his child with a fever needs an antibiotic, because the last time his child had a fever the doctor prescribed an antibiotic. Common sense perhaps, but maybe this time the child has a viral illness that antibiotics won’t help. The plumber has common sense but he can’t diagnose the difference between a bacterial and viral illness.
I’m not going to get into a discussion on homeopathy. It’s water. Anyone who enjoys using homeopathy is welcome to continue!
You’re simply incorrect when you say there’s “a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies.”
These are exactly the sorts of false conclusions, quite honestly, the previous post was trying to address.
The mRNA vaccines, like antibiotics, have some strong and useful effects. Like any strong medication or any strong vaccine, they have some negative effects. These negative effects must not be minimized or dismissed. Every medical treatment that works also carries risk.
But after billions and billions of doses being administered worldwide, the cost-benefit is clearly on the side of vaccines.
Could it really be the case that every government in the world is in cahoots with vaccine manufacturers, and all those governments are also so evil, without exception, that they’ll give dangerous vaccines to their people, including people in their own families? Not a single nation has sounded the alarm? What does that tell you? Here’s a good place for common sense! 😀
It’s not a reasonable logical leap from “mRNA vaccines, like all vaccines, have side effects” to “the vaccines are dangerous and the spike proteins are to blame.”
You are exposed to enormously greater quantities of spike protein every time you get sick with covid. The created antigen -- in this case the scary-sounding “spike protein” -- is what prompts your body to protect itself from infection. Every vaccine introduces some foreign thing into your body that prompts your body to protect itself from infection.
You are welcome to disagree about what an “expert” is, if you believe I characterized an expert in a way you dislike. I believe I’m using it in the commonly understood sense: we ask the doctor and not the plumber for medical advice.
My point about experts in this post is that there is no such thing as a gender expert, and I hope I’ve established my reasons for thinking so.
First, I need to share some background on myself: I have always aligned with liberal or Democrat policies and voted for them. I have had the Covid vaccine + 1 booster (other boosters delayed because I got Covid and followed the science on trying to maximize natural immunity + booster immunity that both wane after time). I worked to help others find the vaccine early when it first came out. I’ve very much lived by “follow the science” and “fact checking” by cross checking with “reliable sources” like media outlets rated as high in factuality (like NYT, NPR, and WaPo), looking at snopes, checking the cdc page, etc.
Then my adolescent daughter was hit with a mental health crisis and she found videos during the school closures when kids basically lived online telling her that transition would solve everything. Like always, I did my research. I read the studies, saw their weaknesses and limitations. I learned everything you are writing about in this post. Then I saw the split between what was being reported by the people I had been taught to trust for my fact checking vs what was being reported and what I was reading in these studies and what you detail in your post. The “bad guys” and the “disreputable sources” (Daily Mail, New York Post, Jesse Singal, etc) were where I found reporting that matched the studies and the reality. It was disorienting beyond belief.
Even worse, the experts I had been taught to trust - doctors, nurses, hospitals, and therapists - and who were involved in my daughter’s direct care were all stating the bad info as facts. And not just the experts. Also family, friends, and teachers.
Am I assuming correctly that you are not the parent of a child who has dealt with the medical and mental healthcare systems for a child questioning their gender identity? It is really hard to overstate how stressful it is to have a child self-harming and actively threatening and attempting suicide, literally trying to save your child, and hearing that this is the only option. And not just hearing it’s the only option, but getting threatened with everything from state intervention and loss of custody to not caring that your child is at high risk of dying because of you. Even if you have all your research, sources cited, and references to relevant laws - even if you have done all the research hat you are describing in your post, do you know how impossible it is to find a therapist, a treatment program, a hospital, anyone who will provide care and support based on the facts? Even those who share your concerns will tell you they have to follow policies by their employer or professional organization.
Also, once the you see and experience all this, seeing all the trusted, “highly factual,” media tell you that you are wrong (and a right wing bigoted hateful parent who thinks they know more than the experts), and everyone from your child’s teacher to the president of the United States telling you you’re wrong while being able to fact check and disprove what they’re saying (and while your daughter gets more and more unwell and nearly dies because no one is willing to consider that perhaps - just for her case - this isn’t working), you start to feel like the ground beneath you is shifting and everything you thought you knew and trusted maybe isn’t. What else are you being told that isn’t true but you don’t have the time to read and dissect every study about it? It’s extremely disorienting and trying to figure out how to walk the line is incredibly hard.
Briefly back to vaccines: vaccine expert Paul Offit - a true expert and a pro-vaccine educator and advocate - has said it may be time to reconsider how we are looking at the boosters and who should be getting them. There are many who would call this anti-vax rhetoric and claim that experts can become captured by right wing narratives and therefore should no longer be considered experts. So what do I do, someone who understands how the “experts” snd “reliable sources” got gender medicine so wrong? I don’t know. But I’m waiting and listening with an open mind with the hard won knowledge that there’s no easy, checklist manual for how to navigate it.
We are now living in a cult- the cult of the experts. Expertise is of course essential in an advanced society. But today claimed expertise is used for power and control. When any dissent from the established narrative is immediately shut down, you are no longer talking about experts concerned about helping people.
Branches of the cult of expertise:
Public health. Follow our dictates or people will die!
Gender health. Follow our dictates or children will die!
Climate change. Follow our dictates or the world will die!
Education. Only teachers know what children should learn. Follow our dictates or the oppressors will harm your children!
Politicians. Follow our dictates or democracy will die!
We need to start using our own ability to think and reason again. Yes, we need experts. We should respect and appreciate them. But we cannot allow our society to become a dictatorship of self proclaimed experts who allow no questions and refuse to show their proof.
One of the points you hit on a couple of times that is so puzzling is how these "experts" think the answer is to essentially Truman Show these people: If we all will just pretend on the surface that
"sure you're a Real woman", or whatever else, that somehow will make it so. As you say, we would never do this with someone suffering a different form of psychological distress, we don't all agree to go around saying that the Schizophrenic man who believes that he's god is really god, that would be counterproductive for both him and us. (I completely support adults doing what they want and will address anyone the way that they wish to be addressed, within reason. But we can't abandon reason completely to temporarily placate the activist types.)
Really good essay. It's nice to see things laid out so clearly.
Thank you for writing this - it's certainly true that "trust experts" doesn't help in a domain where we haven't had the time and resources to build up proper expertise yet - there are no gender experts (although, possible plot twist later in this post).
I've been looking more into what might have happened at the Tavistock and found an old Sunday Times Magazine article, I'm afraid I don't have an exact date but it refers to the CQC (care quality commission) rating GIDS (gender identity and development services, that includes the Tavistock clinic) as inadequate "last year" and the Cass interim report (that investigated the Tavistock) "will be published this year". I'd guess that puts it around some time in late 2021? Here's my summary for any readers who are interested.
The Sunday Times is politically centre-right, I'd say; they certainly do not pander to a left-wing audience, so when they mention something that the left is always saying, that increases my confidence that it might be true. One of my main takeaways from the article is that in CAMHS (child and adult mental health services, part of the NHS), to put it politely, demand greatly outnumbers supply. In some sense this is true of the NHS as a whole (waiting times to see your GP or accident & emergency services are a staple of local news websites), and the official answer to that is - to decree targets, and where they can, link them to performance-based payments.
So imagine a child gets to their local GP or mental health service, and among other problems they mention gender identity or present in a not completely gender-typical way. A charitable explanation is the local service recognises they're not gender experts, and refers them to the national centre for that kind of thing. A less charitable explanation is their calendar is kind of full, but ticking the "referred to specialist service" box helps them to hit their targets - the article calls this "offloaded to GIDS".
GIDS goes from 72 referrals in 2009-10 to around 1800 in 2016-17 to 3000-ish at the time the article was written. A lot of the article is statements from current or former Tavistock/GIDS clinicians, and it seems that under pressure, protocol completely went out the window. One interviewee said that clinicians were supposed to work on cases in teams of two with at least one person in each team a senior clinician, but in practice you could have two junior clinicians matched up together as GIDS hired new juniors to deal with the backlog. In theory, GIDS followed the Dutch protocol (mentioned in the main article) but even that only allows prescribing puberty blockers together with regular check-up meetings and support. The GIDS protocol seems to have been more of a "here's your prescription, you're cured now, next please!" kind of thing. In once case mentioned, a child was prescribed Lupron (normally a chemical castration drug for sex offenders, but also blocks puberty) after their very first meeting with GIDS. So GIDS was not even properly implementing the Dutch protocol. Some of the clinicians knew that they were in uncharted territory - "We all worry. Of course we worry.", one is quoted as saying. "It was the blind leading the blind.", another said.
This is the background against which the supporters of purely "affirming" treatment were allowed to do whatever they like as long they hit their targets. But here's the twist - there were actually people working at GIDS initially who were the closest thing to a "gender expert" that exists, namely gay and lesbian clinicians who genuinely wanted the best for the next generation of rainbow youth, and this does not mean transition at all costs as soon as possible. They would, at least at first, see the feminine presenting boys and tomboy girls (many of whom reported homophobic bullying) and try their best to offer a combination of therapy and reassurance. One case mentioned was a girl who was called a dyke and bullied at school because she liked Thomas the Tank Engine as a child, and later on hated her periods. Back before there were 3000 cases on the waiting list, someone could sit down with her and talk her through how many girls felt this way - later she moved on to sixth form school and told them "her dysphoria was resolved" and she was no longer being bullied. She did not transition.
The article goes on to describe how the new leaders at the Tavistock accused anyone who didn't agree with them, but especially the old guard of gays and lesbians, of being transphobic. Especially when they pointed out they themselves had been effeminate or butch as kids and that didn't make them trans, but "trans clinicians were revered for having superior insight and authority ... the testimony of gay staff was dismissed as irrelevant, even transphobic". Some of them took the hint, and resigned. One clinician quotes a case of a girl diagnosed as trans because she liked to wear boxer shorts (clinician: "I said in the Nineties this was what girls wore with baggy jeans.") The pro-transition director of GIDS Polly Carmichael meanwhile explained that with puberty blockers "The good thing is, if you stop the injections, it's like pressing a start button and the body just carries on developing as it would if you hadn't taken the injection."
Other patients, in the opinion of the clinicians quoted, were clear cases of anorexia, or had family/financial problems, or were autistic - but in the words of one of the interviewees, their partner clinician in some cases "only wanted to talk about gender".
In summary, according to the article (at least my interpretation), what happened in the UK was a severe capacity problem hitting a severe ideology problem, even though there were people around with actual expertise, both in psychology and in lesbian/gay issues.
Great text. I just object to the characterization of Covid policies. For the most, experts recommended what was the majority consensus at the time. Politicians at times did a poor job of implementing the possible maximum of science based policies at a given time - which led to Yoyo politics in many countries. The basis of which was, I believe, that they had no idea of what they actually wanted to achieve.
Mind, that is no argument against politicians making those choices in the end. Who else could? An epidemologist can make recommendations, but hardly has any grasp of potential side effects of the policies he proposes. Likewise, an economist - another expert desperately needed as an advisor in that situation - hardly has any idea of potential side effects of economic proposals etc. etc. So, a responsible politician will end up with a lot of contradictory inputs about a pandemic and will have to try to balance things out to achieve an outcome that kills as few people as possible and halts or at least slows down the spreading of the disease.
Being a responsible politician necessarily includes to have an idea of how our complex societies work and how one wants a society to look like. By far most politicians in power in the Western world and probably much beyond meet neither of these criteria.
With all due respect, you are making a lot of statements that are neither factually correct nor true, demonstrating the danger of thinking that originates in false, unexamined axioms.
“Experts” do not know or understand issues more broadly, but only more deeply ( and therefore by necessity more narrowly). In biomedical research experts base their statements and beliefs largely on published scientific papers. The editors of several major scientific journals having stated that this research cannot be trusted should prompt you to rethink your deep trust in such “experts “. As a matter of fact, deep expertise in one area (coupled sometimes with emotional confirmation bias) can blind you to dangers that are created when proceeding without understanding associated areas, and what is often referred to as “common sense”, ie dispassionate logical reasoning, can therefore often result in better decision making. This has most certainly been shown throughout the Covid “vaccination” fiasco.
You also make an incorrect statement about homeopathic remedies. While generally safe when chosen and dosed appropriately, they can most certainly have adverse effects. Such an adverse effect is sometimes referred to as a proving.
There is most certainly a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies. There is also an immoral amount of lying and deceit from “expert”-manned government agencies. If the scientific aspect feels overwhelming to wade through and you therefore chose to get your information second hand through “experts” such as the aforementioned groups, you might see the recent Rasmussen poll about the ubiquity of severe side effects from these therapies.
Lastly, you argue by creating false dichotomies. There is, for example, never reason to choose to either always use antibiotics or never use antibiotics. Understanding both the potential benefits and significant dangers of using pharmaceutical antibiotics can guide the appropriate use of them. The fake tweets create an unnecessary strawman argument which you would not have needed to include were your claims more factually-based and your arguments on more solid ground.
I honestly don’t understand your objections very well, although I’m truly trying to understand.
My statements about antibiotics (in the other post) were a thought experiment. They were not intended to make factual claims about antibiotics (other than “used appropriately, antibiotics cure infections, save lives, and prevent bad long-term outcomes of untreated bacterial infections, so a parent would be foolish to reject them out of hand”).
That’s hardly a controversial view. Nor did I intend anyone to understand it to mean “antibiotics are always good for every ailment.” That would be quite silly.
The point was, many parents would be frightened by the (true but small) dangers of antibiotics, which are arguably greater than the (true but small) dangers of the covid vaccines, if antibiotics were introduced today with similar scare-mongering tactics as we see with the vaccines.
I stand by my points that true information can be at times misleading (the previous post) and false information can be misleading (this post).
I stand by my opinion that if there’s a problem you cannot solve yourself, if you want to maximize your overall outcomes in life you will do well to listen to reputable, credible experts.
A doctor, for example, will know better than a plumber when taking antibiotics would be safe and appropriate for your child or not.
The pediatrician who’s always looked after your child will know better than a random person on Twitter claiming to be a doctor about what treatments or vaccines your child needs.
That does not mean listening to experts is an infallible approach. That doesn’t mean you’ll always be pleased with the result. That doesn’t mean that you must suspend your own critical thinking.
It just means you’re probably better off believing a credible doctor who’s studied the treatment (whether antibiotics or vaccines) than a person on Twitter who posts a chart of true but misleading information from CDC.
These are not at all wild or controversial claims! It’s something, though, which some people might not have considered before or thought about -- ie, that they might be so frightened by information that might factually be true (but misleading) that they make bad choices.
There’s a place for “common sense” to be sure. That’s similar to “trusting your gut.” We are in agreement about common sense.
However, often common sense without expertise is wrong -- just as a plumber might think his child with a fever needs an antibiotic, because the last time his child had a fever the doctor prescribed an antibiotic. Common sense perhaps, but maybe this time the child has a viral illness that antibiotics won’t help. The plumber has common sense but he can’t diagnose the difference between a bacterial and viral illness.
I’m not going to get into a discussion on homeopathy. It’s water. Anyone who enjoys using homeopathy is welcome to continue!
You’re simply incorrect when you say there’s “a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies.”
These are exactly the sorts of false conclusions, quite honestly, the previous post was trying to address.
The mRNA vaccines, like antibiotics, have some strong and useful effects. Like any strong medication or any strong vaccine, they have some negative effects. These negative effects must not be minimized or dismissed. Every medical treatment that works also carries risk.
But after billions and billions of doses being administered worldwide, the cost-benefit is clearly on the side of vaccines.
Could it really be the case that every government in the world is in cahoots with vaccine manufacturers, and all those governments are also so evil, without exception, that they’ll give dangerous vaccines to their people, including people in their own families? Not a single nation has sounded the alarm? What does that tell you? Here’s a good place for common sense! 😀
It’s not a reasonable logical leap from “mRNA vaccines, like all vaccines, have side effects” to “the vaccines are dangerous and the spike proteins are to blame.”
You are exposed to enormously greater quantities of spike protein every time you get sick with covid. The created antigen -- in this case the scary-sounding “spike protein” -- is what prompts your body to protect itself from infection. Every vaccine introduces some foreign thing into your body that prompts your body to protect itself from infection.
You are welcome to disagree about what an “expert” is, if you believe I characterized an expert in a way you dislike. I believe I’m using it in the commonly understood sense: we ask the doctor and not the plumber for medical advice.
My point about experts in this post is that there is no such thing as a gender expert, and I hope I’ve established my reasons for thinking so.
Be well!
First, I need to share some background on myself: I have always aligned with liberal or Democrat policies and voted for them. I have had the Covid vaccine + 1 booster (other boosters delayed because I got Covid and followed the science on trying to maximize natural immunity + booster immunity that both wane after time). I worked to help others find the vaccine early when it first came out. I’ve very much lived by “follow the science” and “fact checking” by cross checking with “reliable sources” like media outlets rated as high in factuality (like NYT, NPR, and WaPo), looking at snopes, checking the cdc page, etc.
Then my adolescent daughter was hit with a mental health crisis and she found videos during the school closures when kids basically lived online telling her that transition would solve everything. Like always, I did my research. I read the studies, saw their weaknesses and limitations. I learned everything you are writing about in this post. Then I saw the split between what was being reported by the people I had been taught to trust for my fact checking vs what was being reported and what I was reading in these studies and what you detail in your post. The “bad guys” and the “disreputable sources” (Daily Mail, New York Post, Jesse Singal, etc) were where I found reporting that matched the studies and the reality. It was disorienting beyond belief.
Even worse, the experts I had been taught to trust - doctors, nurses, hospitals, and therapists - and who were involved in my daughter’s direct care were all stating the bad info as facts. And not just the experts. Also family, friends, and teachers.
Am I assuming correctly that you are not the parent of a child who has dealt with the medical and mental healthcare systems for a child questioning their gender identity? It is really hard to overstate how stressful it is to have a child self-harming and actively threatening and attempting suicide, literally trying to save your child, and hearing that this is the only option. And not just hearing it’s the only option, but getting threatened with everything from state intervention and loss of custody to not caring that your child is at high risk of dying because of you. Even if you have all your research, sources cited, and references to relevant laws - even if you have done all the research hat you are describing in your post, do you know how impossible it is to find a therapist, a treatment program, a hospital, anyone who will provide care and support based on the facts? Even those who share your concerns will tell you they have to follow policies by their employer or professional organization.
Also, once the you see and experience all this, seeing all the trusted, “highly factual,” media tell you that you are wrong (and a right wing bigoted hateful parent who thinks they know more than the experts), and everyone from your child’s teacher to the president of the United States telling you you’re wrong while being able to fact check and disprove what they’re saying (and while your daughter gets more and more unwell and nearly dies because no one is willing to consider that perhaps - just for her case - this isn’t working), you start to feel like the ground beneath you is shifting and everything you thought you knew and trusted maybe isn’t. What else are you being told that isn’t true but you don’t have the time to read and dissect every study about it? It’s extremely disorienting and trying to figure out how to walk the line is incredibly hard.
Briefly back to vaccines: vaccine expert Paul Offit - a true expert and a pro-vaccine educator and advocate - has said it may be time to reconsider how we are looking at the boosters and who should be getting them. There are many who would call this anti-vax rhetoric and claim that experts can become captured by right wing narratives and therefore should no longer be considered experts. So what do I do, someone who understands how the “experts” snd “reliable sources” got gender medicine so wrong? I don’t know. But I’m waiting and listening with an open mind with the hard won knowledge that there’s no easy, checklist manual for how to navigate it.
We are now living in a cult- the cult of the experts. Expertise is of course essential in an advanced society. But today claimed expertise is used for power and control. When any dissent from the established narrative is immediately shut down, you are no longer talking about experts concerned about helping people.
Branches of the cult of expertise:
Public health. Follow our dictates or people will die!
Gender health. Follow our dictates or children will die!
Climate change. Follow our dictates or the world will die!
Education. Only teachers know what children should learn. Follow our dictates or the oppressors will harm your children!
Politicians. Follow our dictates or democracy will die!
We need to start using our own ability to think and reason again. Yes, we need experts. We should respect and appreciate them. But we cannot allow our society to become a dictatorship of self proclaimed experts who allow no questions and refuse to show their proof.
One of the points you hit on a couple of times that is so puzzling is how these "experts" think the answer is to essentially Truman Show these people: If we all will just pretend on the surface that
"sure you're a Real woman", or whatever else, that somehow will make it so. As you say, we would never do this with someone suffering a different form of psychological distress, we don't all agree to go around saying that the Schizophrenic man who believes that he's god is really god, that would be counterproductive for both him and us. (I completely support adults doing what they want and will address anyone the way that they wish to be addressed, within reason. But we can't abandon reason completely to temporarily placate the activist types.)
Really good essay. It's nice to see things laid out so clearly.
Thank you for writing this - it's certainly true that "trust experts" doesn't help in a domain where we haven't had the time and resources to build up proper expertise yet - there are no gender experts (although, possible plot twist later in this post).
I've been looking more into what might have happened at the Tavistock and found an old Sunday Times Magazine article, I'm afraid I don't have an exact date but it refers to the CQC (care quality commission) rating GIDS (gender identity and development services, that includes the Tavistock clinic) as inadequate "last year" and the Cass interim report (that investigated the Tavistock) "will be published this year". I'd guess that puts it around some time in late 2021? Here's my summary for any readers who are interested.
The Sunday Times is politically centre-right, I'd say; they certainly do not pander to a left-wing audience, so when they mention something that the left is always saying, that increases my confidence that it might be true. One of my main takeaways from the article is that in CAMHS (child and adult mental health services, part of the NHS), to put it politely, demand greatly outnumbers supply. In some sense this is true of the NHS as a whole (waiting times to see your GP or accident & emergency services are a staple of local news websites), and the official answer to that is - to decree targets, and where they can, link them to performance-based payments.
So imagine a child gets to their local GP or mental health service, and among other problems they mention gender identity or present in a not completely gender-typical way. A charitable explanation is the local service recognises they're not gender experts, and refers them to the national centre for that kind of thing. A less charitable explanation is their calendar is kind of full, but ticking the "referred to specialist service" box helps them to hit their targets - the article calls this "offloaded to GIDS".
GIDS goes from 72 referrals in 2009-10 to around 1800 in 2016-17 to 3000-ish at the time the article was written. A lot of the article is statements from current or former Tavistock/GIDS clinicians, and it seems that under pressure, protocol completely went out the window. One interviewee said that clinicians were supposed to work on cases in teams of two with at least one person in each team a senior clinician, but in practice you could have two junior clinicians matched up together as GIDS hired new juniors to deal with the backlog. In theory, GIDS followed the Dutch protocol (mentioned in the main article) but even that only allows prescribing puberty blockers together with regular check-up meetings and support. The GIDS protocol seems to have been more of a "here's your prescription, you're cured now, next please!" kind of thing. In once case mentioned, a child was prescribed Lupron (normally a chemical castration drug for sex offenders, but also blocks puberty) after their very first meeting with GIDS. So GIDS was not even properly implementing the Dutch protocol. Some of the clinicians knew that they were in uncharted territory - "We all worry. Of course we worry.", one is quoted as saying. "It was the blind leading the blind.", another said.
This is the background against which the supporters of purely "affirming" treatment were allowed to do whatever they like as long they hit their targets. But here's the twist - there were actually people working at GIDS initially who were the closest thing to a "gender expert" that exists, namely gay and lesbian clinicians who genuinely wanted the best for the next generation of rainbow youth, and this does not mean transition at all costs as soon as possible. They would, at least at first, see the feminine presenting boys and tomboy girls (many of whom reported homophobic bullying) and try their best to offer a combination of therapy and reassurance. One case mentioned was a girl who was called a dyke and bullied at school because she liked Thomas the Tank Engine as a child, and later on hated her periods. Back before there were 3000 cases on the waiting list, someone could sit down with her and talk her through how many girls felt this way - later she moved on to sixth form school and told them "her dysphoria was resolved" and she was no longer being bullied. She did not transition.
The article goes on to describe how the new leaders at the Tavistock accused anyone who didn't agree with them, but especially the old guard of gays and lesbians, of being transphobic. Especially when they pointed out they themselves had been effeminate or butch as kids and that didn't make them trans, but "trans clinicians were revered for having superior insight and authority ... the testimony of gay staff was dismissed as irrelevant, even transphobic". Some of them took the hint, and resigned. One clinician quotes a case of a girl diagnosed as trans because she liked to wear boxer shorts (clinician: "I said in the Nineties this was what girls wore with baggy jeans.") The pro-transition director of GIDS Polly Carmichael meanwhile explained that with puberty blockers "The good thing is, if you stop the injections, it's like pressing a start button and the body just carries on developing as it would if you hadn't taken the injection."
Other patients, in the opinion of the clinicians quoted, were clear cases of anorexia, or had family/financial problems, or were autistic - but in the words of one of the interviewees, their partner clinician in some cases "only wanted to talk about gender".
In summary, according to the article (at least my interpretation), what happened in the UK was a severe capacity problem hitting a severe ideology problem, even though there were people around with actual expertise, both in psychology and in lesbian/gay issues.
Great text. I just object to the characterization of Covid policies. For the most, experts recommended what was the majority consensus at the time. Politicians at times did a poor job of implementing the possible maximum of science based policies at a given time - which led to Yoyo politics in many countries. The basis of which was, I believe, that they had no idea of what they actually wanted to achieve.
Mind, that is no argument against politicians making those choices in the end. Who else could? An epidemologist can make recommendations, but hardly has any grasp of potential side effects of the policies he proposes. Likewise, an economist - another expert desperately needed as an advisor in that situation - hardly has any idea of potential side effects of economic proposals etc. etc. So, a responsible politician will end up with a lot of contradictory inputs about a pandemic and will have to try to balance things out to achieve an outcome that kills as few people as possible and halts or at least slows down the spreading of the disease.
Being a responsible politician necessarily includes to have an idea of how our complex societies work and how one wants a society to look like. By far most politicians in power in the Western world and probably much beyond meet neither of these criteria.
With all due respect, you are making a lot of statements that are neither factually correct nor true, demonstrating the danger of thinking that originates in false, unexamined axioms.
“Experts” do not know or understand issues more broadly, but only more deeply ( and therefore by necessity more narrowly). In biomedical research experts base their statements and beliefs largely on published scientific papers. The editors of several major scientific journals having stated that this research cannot be trusted should prompt you to rethink your deep trust in such “experts “. As a matter of fact, deep expertise in one area (coupled sometimes with emotional confirmation bias) can blind you to dangers that are created when proceeding without understanding associated areas, and what is often referred to as “common sense”, ie dispassionate logical reasoning, can therefore often result in better decision making. This has most certainly been shown throughout the Covid “vaccination” fiasco.
You also make an incorrect statement about homeopathic remedies. While generally safe when chosen and dosed appropriately, they can most certainly have adverse effects. Such an adverse effect is sometimes referred to as a proving.
There is most certainly a vast amount of evidence at this point about the dangerous effects of spike protein-based injection therapies. There is also an immoral amount of lying and deceit from “expert”-manned government agencies. If the scientific aspect feels overwhelming to wade through and you therefore chose to get your information second hand through “experts” such as the aforementioned groups, you might see the recent Rasmussen poll about the ubiquity of severe side effects from these therapies.
Lastly, you argue by creating false dichotomies. There is, for example, never reason to choose to either always use antibiotics or never use antibiotics. Understanding both the potential benefits and significant dangers of using pharmaceutical antibiotics can guide the appropriate use of them. The fake tweets create an unnecessary strawman argument which you would not have needed to include were your claims more factually-based and your arguments on more solid ground.