Bob Withers. Part 5

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This section looks at how young people are being misled into becoming lifelong medical patients. In this section the author looks at different scenarios based on fictional cases which, nevertheless, draw on real life cases from his therapeutic experience. I will add in some observations, from my own experience, of parenting a trans-identified son.

In this section we have some reflections on how our children come to share a belief they are born in the wrong body. 👇. These ideas are not emerging in a cultural vacuum. What shocks me, to this day, is the promulgation of this ideology by Childrens BBC. Programmes like ”I am Leo” were marketing this ideology to our kids. The main culprit, in terms of my son, was ChildLine, who are run by the NSPCC. For those who don’t know this is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who are the only children’s charity to have statutory powers to intervene and ”protect” children. The NSPCC is deeply implicated in fostering a bodily disassociation as ”normal” to troubled kids who turned to them for help. {You can find my entire series on the NSPCC from the menu}.

Even purported academic/medical conferences are promoting this ideology and are even funded by the very pharmaceutical companies who stand to profit from our children’s distress. 👇 Big Pharma trumps talking therapies.

Bob then covers some of the common narratives of young girls, identifying as boys, who claimed to have spent time socialising with wolves, but this is not a social contagion, right?

He then covers the case of an autistic female who shed her feelings of “weirdness” when she identified as male. She resisted puberty blockers because of concern about the health risks. Finally she reconciled to her sex, and sexuality:

My son feels ”weird” about being a male, attracted to males, who enjoys female friends, likes to bake and was ostracised and subject to homophobic bullying from a young age. What is happening to him now is Gay Conversion Therapy. 👇. Whether intended or not this is the result of this, deeply homophobic, ideology.

The clinicans who are dosing my son with sterilsing hormomes are criminally culpable and I would like to see trials and imprisonment. Will it happen? I fear not because there are simply too many, high profile, people who have staked their reputations on defending the idea of “transgender kids”.

Next Bob looks at the TV show Butterfly in which Anna Friel plays the mum of a boy, Max, who feels as if he was meant to be a girl. Series advice was taken from the lobby group Mermaids. The Tavistock apparently withdrew their support for the programme.

This was from the trailer:

The programme foregrounds the idea of only two options. Allow Max to be Maxine or have a child suicide on your hands. Later they also dramatise the idea of a child attempting to castrate himself; all promote the necessary application of puberty blockers. The suicide data does not support these claims.


Bob then examines possible pathways for Max/Maxine. One of these is a non-medicalised future:

As in the ITV drama, Max could have a medicalised future as ”Maxine”. What could be the outcome? One outcome is pharmaceutical companies stand to make a lot of money. Once you start a kid on puberty blockers they, almost invariably, proceed to cross-sex hormones. He will be a lifelong customer.He will also be sterile. In the long term he will have a significantly increased risk of suicide. This is the only suicide statistic that trans-activists shy away from referencing.

Bob then looks at some other consequences. There are some knowns some unknowns. I impact on bone density is a known, impact on sexual function / ability to orgasm is a dirty secret which some, post-operative, males have reported.

One of the consequences of puberty blockers is stunted genitalia, for males, which complicates any future surgeries. Even with “successful” surgeries there are issues re ”maintaining“ a ”neo-vagina”.

After a reminder that Mermaids advised the series producer, and some skepticism about the picture painted in ”Butterfly”, we are presented with an alternative scenario where Max/Maxine gets some meaningful, therapeutic intervention. Eventually he discloses some child sexual abuse and his mother’s feelings about his “sexually predatory” father. Max begins to consider whether these things promoted rejection of his sexed body.

Like many detransitioners this costs him dearly in terms of his social networks.

Finally the author draws these conclusions. Affirmation relies on low quality research and the silencing of critical/questioning voices with cries of ”transphobia”.

Withers makes a final point about the societal response to ”Gender Dysphoria” and other mental health issues. Is it our own discomfort which drives us to accept a medical diagnosis and treatment pathway. Have we embarked on a programme of sexual lobotomy? “Surely this must suit us for some reason”

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Bob Withers: Detransition. Part 4

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You can read the other pieces in this series below: 👇

Bob Withers: Series.

Detransition

This part of the paper covers the consequences of unthinking affirmation of a gender Identity which is at odds with their biological sex. The mistake we are making is written on the bodies of our young who are taking cross sex hormones and having unnecessary surgical procedures.

Writing in June 2020, Bob notes the increasing phenomenon of detransitioners. These are people who have had some medical intervention to resolve their distress, under the aegis of a transgender identity, only to realise they have made a catastrophic mistake. Gradually we are seeing more public accounts of detransition and some, scholarly, research. At the same time James Caspian has been denied the opportunity to research this phenomenon, at Bath Spa University, due to concerns about ”reputational risk”.

There is a lack of reliable data on rates of regret / detransition. The phrase ”loss to follow up” recurs in many studies which ought not to be a surprise. Why would you return to the clinic who are responsible for your ”transition” ? We have no way of knowing how many of the missing 36%, mentioned below 👇, also regret their medical interventions.

Another feature of this research is the way completed suicides are treated. There were three suicides in a cohort followed up from a Nottingham clinic. They were not counted as detransitioners but their subsequent suicide certainly does not suggest surgery was an unmitigated success.

The use of misleading statistics about suicide, especially in relation to children, is one of the most egregious tactics used by the Transgender Lobby. It is leveraged to encourage parents to accept a “gender identity” and hasten them to affirm /medicalise. Yet the same groups show a marked lack of curiosity about solid data on post transition suicide rates.

Despite the paucity of formal research there is a growing community of detransitioners who are finding each other in on-line forums, conducting their own research and making YouTube content about their regrets.

Detrans Community on Reddit:

Since this paper was written the detrans subreddit has exploded in terms of its numbers as per below. Since June 2020 the reddit detrans forum has increased from 12,000 + to nearly 26,000 as of February 2021.

I have done two substack posts covering comments by posters, on the above forum. Below is the one on males who regret their ”transition”.

Detransitioned males

This is one on detransitioned females. There are commonalities between the two groups but also some sex specific differences in both the reasons for medicalising their distress and their decision to detransition.

Detransitioned females

The above accounts need more formal research so that we don’t continue to harm a new generation.

Dr Az Hakeem: Trans


This piece by Bob Withers also covers the work of Dr Az Hakeem, who conducted therapy for men who regretted their transition. He provides many case studies in the book ”Trans”. There are many reasons this group are marginalised/silenced. Some are related to personal feelings of culpability and foolishness about the, irreversible, medical steps they taken. Backlash from within the trans community is another reason; many are accused of risking other, trans-identified, people’s access to surgeries etc. This can be very powerful deterrent if your community of friends is drawn from within transgender groups. Many detransitioners speak of losing entire friendship groups when they detransitioned, especially if they questioned transgender ideology.

Dr Hakeem had the inspired idea of setting up a group for those with post-operative regret. He writes about how many became fixtures of this group and how it allowed them to recover self esteem. Another practice was to run combined sessions for this group and the pre-surgical group. The second group were looking forward to medical interventions. So what happened when they mixed these two groups? 98% abandoned the idea of medical treatments for their feelings of gender dysphoria

The group who voluntarily referred themselves to Dr Hakeem were a self-selecting group. Its hard to argue they were representative but it is noteworthy that they were prepared to go back to the gender clinic and make their regret clear. It is odd that this didn’t result in more research and better follow up of their post-surgical clients. Even more odd is the fact we have actually lowered the bar to medical intervention, in recent years. Given the explosion of people with a ”transgender” identity and the average time estimated for regret to set in, what kind of situation will we face in a decade?

My fifth piece from this paper will explore how young people came to their belief in a personal identity as ”transgender”.

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Bob Withers: Medicalising distress.

This is part 3 on an excellent paper by Bob Withers.

You can read parts one and two here:

Bob Withers: Series.

Why are we treating distress by blocking puberty, prescribing cross-sex hormones and surgeries? Not only are we ignoring the underlying issues we are creating new, medical, issues for this vulnerable group. Below are the kind of co-morbidities which exist within this group now labelled as ”transgender”. Underlying issues are left untreated by this rush to label these kids as “trans” and medicalise their distress. We have had medical fads before and are now, uncritically, assuming these psychological problems as the state of being ”transgender”. This is a label of convenience, which just happens to make pharmaceutical companies a lot of money.

This diagnosis is encouraged by trans-activists who believe they are supporting a new civil rights issue. Children are also being bombarded by trans-ideology by broadcasters, like the BBC and purported children’s charities like the NSPCC, via ChildLine. Our kids follow YouTube influencers and can easily find out how to access drugs by learning a script. The script may include invented childhood histories, real or claimed self-harming and suicide threats. These stories are replete with reinterpretations of the past and may include the phrase ”authentic self” accompanied by unverifiable claims to feel like the opposite sex. Using these phrases it is all too easy to obtain drugs from a credulous, or cowed, medical profession. These drug pushers have either imbibed the propaganda, or are operating a profitable sideline. A decade long campaign has removed any meaningful ”gatekeeping” , exposing our kids to having their bodies mined, for profit, by an unscrupulous industry. Finding a therapist who does not ”affirm” your child is nigh on impossible.

Big Pharma!

This is where it starts to get sinister. In the previous blog Pfizer pharmaceuticals were funding a conference hosted at the Tavistock gender clinic. Here we discover that Ferrings Pharmaceuticals are funding studies on the drugs they are making massive profits from!

I did a bit of digging on the Electoral Commission’s superb database. Heres the headline figure from donations made, by Ferring pharmaceuticals to the Liberal Democrats.

Here’s a screen shot of the list. That entire sum went to the LibDems!

Denton’s Document

Withers is referring to the Denton’s document, below, which outlines the strategy for making sure laws are passed to embed gender identity ideology in legislation. This document was a collaboration between a trans lobby group (IGLYO), the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the worlds largest law firm. I blogged about that, sinister, document here:

That Denton’s Document

Follow the money

He is not wrong about the profits to be made. This is just for puberty blockers. Note also that the courts shut down one profitable market, for corruption! Are our kids the new market? You, bet they are.

Consider the profits to be made by lifelong dependence on cross-sex hormones? Throw in the surgeries and look at the predictions from GM Insights. This tells investors where to head to make big money. You can read the preview of their report here: 👇

It’s an Industry


Here they project the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of these surgeries. Anything above 15% is regarded as a good return. Government policy is integral to the growth of this “market”. We are fostering a bodily disassociative disorder for profit!

Here they are estimating the market. They are leveraging the distress of our youth for billion dollar returns.

They do bury this information in the footnotes.

A stark warning.

I will end with this blog with a chilling prediction from the author. My next piece will stay with this paper but cover the section on detransition.

 

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Bob Withers. Puberty Blockers. 2

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Part two looking at the work of Bob Withers.

You can read part one here:

Bob Withers: Autogynephilia. 1

This part of the paper deals with blocking puberty in children who we have decided are “transgender”. These are powerful drugs and are not licensed for the purpose of halting puberty in healthy children. (They have been used for a condition known as precocious puberty). They have been billed as harmless and reversible. This not true. Little is known about the long term effects but the impact on bone density is documented. This can lead to osteoporosis. This is also a treatment used to treat prostate cancer and to chemically castrate sex offenders.

Withers quotes the work of Michael Biggs on puberty suppression. I covered that in this post :

TAVISTOCK 4 : Michael Biggs

Even for precocious puberty, where we do have data, blocking puberty resulted in a drop in IQ. Most of this data, scant though it is, is mainly about females, who are more likely to experience, or be medically treated for, the condition. There is, therefore, less data on males.

I find this, personally, terrifying because doctors have prescribed these drugs to my son and brain maturation relies on sex based hormones; which are being blocked. The medical profession are acquiescing in this treatment despite the lack of research.

Bob describes attending a conference about the “Science of Gender” , at the Tavistock. Note, this conference was funded by Pfizer pharmaceuticals! Withers references two speakers. Notice the role of sex hormones in brain development. I looked up Professor Blakemore. You can find a presentation she did on YouTube for The Royal Institution. What struck me about her talk was how little we know about the processes involved in brain development. Despite this lack of knowledge we are experimenting with pubertal development in children/adolescents.

{As a side issue I notice the myelination of nerve pathways occurs during this period. Damage to myelination sheaths occurs in multiple sclerosis and there is some research showing males who take exogenous female hormones are seven times as likely to develop multiple sclerosis. I will blog about this, when I get chance}.

Another speaker gave a talk on puberty blockers given to sheep. 👇. Cognition is impacted and this persists even a year after stopping taking them.

You can access this paper here. 👇

Puberty Blockers in sheep

A pause? 

As you can see the claim puberty is only “paused” is not borne out by the data. Children put on puberty blocking drugs invariably progress to cross sex hormones. Historic data, prior to this early medical intervention, saw most desist, and turn out to be gay males or lesbians, by the way. I am skeptical in respect of the claim, made below, this is due to superior diagnostic techniques. Those of us with children /teens who claim a transgender identity know they learn a script to make sure they get access to hormones.

This is a poorly evidenced medical response to kids struggling with gender identity issue. Many of them are gay, some autistic, kids in the care system are over-represented at gender clinics, as are females more generally.

Looks a lot like eugenics.

In part three I will look at the same paper which explores how society is treating distress by administering drugs and the drug companies who are profiting. If you are able to support my work you can do so here. I will keep my content free but I do this full-time and unwaged and I have an annual bill of £240 coming up to renew this blog.

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Bob Withers: Autogynephilia. 1

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I am going to do a series on Bob’s work because it covers a lot of ground. I will deal with the different sections in the same order, as the paper, starting with a case of autogynephilia encountered in Bob’s own clinical practice. ( He also covers other motivations to transition, the role of pharmaceutical companies, and the phenomenon of detransition. He ends with some hypothetical, therapeutic scenarios using fictional ”cases” to avoid ethical issues arising from using real cases. All important issues)

I was unable to access a PDF to save but you can read the whole thing here:

Transgender Medicalisation

Here is the abstract:

Detransitioned Autogynephile.

This article begins with a, sympathetic, portrayal of a man who is an autogynephile. For neophytes this is a man who is sexually aroused at the thought of himself as a woman. Chris sought therapy from Bob when he realised identifying as a woman had not eradicated the feelings which drew him to a transgender identity. He feels let down by the therapists who assessed him. The therapists he saw facilitated access to the, misleadingly named, ”sexual reassignment surgery” (SRS). This is a misnomer because It is not possible to change sex. Latterly this is being called by the even more euphemistic, and deceptive, term “gender affirming surgery”. A surgery some people come to regret as is the case with Chris.

Women’s Rights.

Before I tell this story, a word about women’s rights. It is my position that no males, however they identify and irrespective of surgical status, belong in women’s spaces. Nevertheless I can exercise compassion for *some* men who find themselves in this situation. I am glad there are therapists seeking to help men with AGP before they take irrevocable decisions. For this therapy to be helpful it should not simply validate their identity. It should aim to contain it before they hurt themselves, and others. I do not think it is helpful to affirm anyone in the belief they are a woman, trapped in a man’s body. It is harmful to the man and the women expected to provide, free, therapeutic support; in the form of validation and admittance to women’s spaces. When a clinician demands prove of “living in role” and tacitly encourages males to trespass on women’s spaces you are force-teaming women. This is not ethical.

My sympathy, for men with this condition, is qualified. It ends when a man, with or without autogynephilia, demands his condition be normalised, uses women’s spaces and promotes gender identity ideology, especially to children. When this is motivated by a desire to gain acceptance for a sexual paraphilia, we need to be able to point out this is unacceptable.

Withers opens with a poem and his interpretation of the underlying motivations for Attis’s madness and motivations for castration, followed by a return to sanity and regret.

Bob’s interpretation of the mythical experience of Attis is as follows:

We then leave the realms of poetry to meet a patient who rejects his maleness and locates the source of his distress in his male sexual organs. He tries to cut out his ”madness” by surgical inversion/removal of his penis. Following surgery his first emotion is one of relief: 👇

Chris retained his identity as a “woman” for nine years but, like Attis, his attempt to evade his maleness was doomed to failure. Chris could ”pass” as a woman but he still experienced the rage he had associated with his maleness, as a result, he had decided to detransition. As I have covered before, in my work on detransitioners, the medical professions are unskilled in this area and Chris had not been provided with the male hormones he could no longer produce himself. He now finds himself suicidal and his attempts to blog about his experience had also incurred the wrath of the ”trans” community.

Chris sincerely wishes he had received appropriate analysis before he took irreversible steps. We learn that his father was an abusive alcoholic who abandoned the family and his mother could only love him as a girl. It is not clear whether this is his mum’s actual stance, a trauma response to his maleness, perhaps, or if this is Chris’s projection. {I certainly have seen more than one case of a mum enthusiastically claiming a male child is her daughter which deserves psychological evaluation, of her motives, conscious or not, before medicalising the child}.

Chris had no positive, male, role model. His flight from the characteristic he shares with his father is complicated by maternal rejection, real or perceived, and further confused by early erotic experiences. Autogynephilia is described as an erotic target location error where a heterosexual man is aroused by the idea of himself, as a woman. It has been described as ”becoming the thing he loves”, it is a sexual paraphilia. Unsurprisingly Trans activists do not wish this to be discussed. I am probably not the first person to call this ”the love we would rather you didn’t name”. It is hard to sell trans rights on the back of a sexual paraphilia.

Even with my research into this area, as a lay person, he is describing common patterns of arousal, shame, purging and the accompanying rage. He had what passed for analysis at a gender clinic but was not challenged and became fixated on his goal. Impatient with waiting lists he found a private provider to perform the surgery.

That last sentence is important. “the evidence base supporting the efficacy of such treatment is extremely poor“.

This will be part one of a series. The next one looks at puberty blockers.

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