The Great Books Of The Western World
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Still here, still reading THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, although I regret to say my progress has been slow. It's a very insightful and readable memoir, but life is just coming at me too fast to make much headway!
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Still working on THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, a bit of a tome, but I found the time to slip in Seicho Matsumoto's TOKYO EXPRESS.
Matsumoto is dead many years, but he published his first novel at 40 and is famous for popularising the detective novel in Japan in the post-war era. This edition of TOKYO EXPRESS is a Penguin Classic.
It's a lean 150 page masterpiece of tightly plotted detective novel. Some very Japanese elements... The train timetables are crucially important. A major plot point turns on their accuracy, and if you've ever been to Japan you'll understand this is the most Japanese thing ever.
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Finished both TOKYO EXPRESS and THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN.
TOKYO EXPRESS is an exceptionally memorable story for such a short novel, not even 150 pages actually. Many of the characters and places are sketched out in only the most bare manner, but Matsumoto still imbues them with character and a sense of personality and place.
A friend who read the book at the same time as me noted that he felt that the translation was not just 'a translation' but a translation of the 1950s Japanese feeling and language also, which makes sense. Just as the tone and words of a hardboiled noir appear dated or old timey to us, there is an element of that going on here with Matsumoto.
Although, having been to Japan numerous times, whereas my friend has not, I think he would be surprised to discover that the country is still surprisingly as Matsumoto depicts it, in terms of much of the social interactions in TOKYO EXPRESS, and the concerns and beliefs of the characters about the nature of the society around them. The sense of shared belief in order and the importance of timetables has not abated.
THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN deserves a longer, and more detailed post, but it's certainly an impressive work on two levels, as a personal and family memoir and as an account of a more elevated spiritual journey.
Now reading something quite light, another LE Modesitt Recluce novel, THE ORDER WAR, but then back to something a little more serious I think.
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On the last third of THE ORDER WAR and while I'm enjoying it, I can't help but feel it's one of the weaker books in the series. I don't want to get into the world-building and metaphysics of the Recluce books, but I feel like there was a great Order / Chaos dichotomy set up, and in this book the author kind of did a Mitochondrians-esque Star Wars style bit of retconning that didn't work out. The idea of introducing Grey Wizards was fine, but he kind of overegged the pudding by making them druids connecting to some kind of gaia worldforest.
Next up, TRANS by Helen Joyce, one of the cornerstones of modern gender critical writing.
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A cornerstone of bad research and antisemitism according to some.
Genealogy Forum Mod
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I was aware people have accused Joyce of antisemitism, but I don't believe the claims are credible. So many real antisemites out there, it's kind of despicable that people would reach for it as a way to attempt to discredit her, TBH.
Gender critical women attract so much online bile though, there are no discernible limits to what people will say.
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The book is either lauded and lambasted online.
It's one I must to read myself.
Genealogy Forum Mod
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TRANS by Helen Joyce.
I'm several chapters in. Having listened to Joyce on podcasts, and read plenty of tweets, it's interesting to read her in long form, where the space exists to really set out her stall in detail.
Joyce begins by setting out how sexual dimorphism is an evolutionary norm not just for humans but all mammals. She discusses the contrast between sex and gender, as the term was once understood by earlier waves of feminists i.e as a contingent preformative social construct.
Joyce comes firmly down into the camp of being a sex realist or gender critical person, and from the outset she is clear that she sees cross-sex identification as being largely erroneous, and argues that its impact on women and children is often harmful, when it allows biological males to enter sex segregated spaces such as changing rooms, prisons and similar.
I don't think I've heard the term "luxury belief" before, but she argues that when younger feminists promote the idea of gender self identification it is for many of them just that, a means of establishing a kind of social capital, by promoting an ideology which is contrary to their own interests, but one which they can afford due to their backgrounds, generally speaking. She argues that many of the middle and upper class people espousing for gender self identification are not fundamentally as at risk as lower income women and children are, particularly the very marginalised like female prisoners or users of domestic violence shelters.
A significant portion of the early part of the book deals with childhood gender dysphoria. I think even since she wrote this book in 2021 / 2022 so much has happened in relation to questions of child safeguarding when it comes to gender affirmative medical treatment and the assessment of children for same, that there is room for an expansion to these chapters.
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I'm about halfway through TRANS now.
It's very journalistic in style, which is helping with the pacing. I do think Joyce possibly assumes a little too much knowledge on the part of her readers, this is very much a book for those who already have some grounding in the fundamentals of sex, gender and feminism. She starts to use terms like gender self identification more or less right off the bat. I suspect it is the case that generally it's people interested in the debate who buy this book, but all the same I can imagine my mother reading this and being lost very quickly. It's worth bearing in mind most people over 40 still largely equate sex and gender (Perhaps they're right to, but that's obviously part of the discussion).
Thoughts at this stage...
There is a long chapter about gender affirming care pathways for trans identifying children, which has become 'the norm' in several countries. That is to say, where clinicians advise parents to support trans identifying children in whatever gender they identify themselves as. This includes social transition, where no medical intervention occurs. But Joyce argues that social transition dramatically increases the likelihood of follow-on medical interventions including the prescription of puberty blockers and other treatments, if permitted and available.
There's quite an interesting point where she argues there is evidence showing that without the use of puberty blockers a majority of cross sex identifying children desist in their belief after puberty. In decades past, before the use of puberty blockers, this was the majority outcome, many growing up to be gay adults living in their biological sex category, whether gender non conforming or otherwise. These are 40+ year old studies in some cases, it must be acknowledged.
Joyce then says that after puberty blockers were introduced the number of desisters basically flipped... The majority of the cross sex identifying children continued to transition, whether socially or with additional interventions. Joyce suggests that clinicians should have been more sceptical about the reasons for this radical about-turn in outcomes. Joyce speculates that the use of puberty blockers suppressed puberty but also the mechanism that saw people desist from cross sex identification after puberty in previous cases. In effect she is suggesting that children uncomfortable with their sex dread puberty, but that there was evidence to suggest that something about puberty itself was also part and parcel of resolving (For a majority) these feelings. She might well be right, but to me this is one of the most interesting questions and she could have done more with it. It could just as easily be argued from the other side.
Incidentally, Joyce does acknowledge that the minority, in these old studies, who did not desist and come to terms with their sex, must have felt like the door had shut on them post-puberty. The reason being that puberty makes it significantly more difficult or even impossible to 'pass' as the opposite sex, without significant interventions. She acknowledges the trauma that this could cause and speculates that it has been a driver of policy direction for some activists.
A difficulty is undoubtedly that, as she details, clinicians and others who have expressed concerns about gender affirming care, for example those who are opposed to socially transitioning children, and might want to attempt to support them to come to terms with the bodies and sex, have come under intense personal and professional pressure to revise these beliefs. It's doubtful how much meaningful research can be conducted in an environment where it seems that anything resembling an alternative to gender affirming care is framed as an attempt as anti trans conversion therapy. Ironically Joyce does provide some evidence of homophobia as a motivation for a small minority of parents to encourage gay children in cross sex identification, which some would say is itself a form of conversion therapy.
My personal belief is that she does correctly identify that there is an inappropriate rush to socially transition young children who are gender non conforming. I personally do wonder if kids who would have been identified in the past as "just" gender non confirming gay kids (Growing up to be butch lesbians, for example, or effeminate gay men) are more likely to be categorised as trans. I also think there are reasonably grounds to be believe that at least some parents and clinicians are too quick to affirm cross sex identification based on the child's own view.
There's a lot I haven't mentioned... Possible social contagion among teenager girls, as suggested by the clustering of trans identifying teenage girls... The role of the internet... Too much to go into.
From a feminist point of view one of Joyce's points that stuck with me is that, acknowledging there remains so much work to be done around women's rights, and in view of the negative experiences of young women in society in particular, there is arguably no surprise that some identify out of womanhood when given the opportunity. So much the more likely during the difficult teenage years.
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Got to the passages which led to her being accused of being anti semitic. To be honest still don't see it at all.
In identity terms she highlighted that these were wealth white billionares, and biological males.
Actually if she was making an anti semtic dog whistle I would gave expected something more on the nose... She doesn't talk about a shadowy global elite, or financiers, the usuals.
Just mentioning Soros might be enough for some though.
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Finished TRANS. Would certainly recommend as one of the best current affairs books of recent years, albeit the nature of it and focus on court cases in the UK and USA means it will date quite sharply.
I missed Halloween, which is regrettable, but now on to DRACUL by Dacre Stoker, which I've heard good things about.
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Still reading DRACUL but also resurrected Robert Kaplan's THE COMING ANARCHY.
Kaplan's whole thing is ... "what is balkanisation and how does it break up nation states?
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Finished THE COMING ANARCHY. Got a bit weak towards the end, it began to read like what it originally was - based on articles written in The Atlantic. The first 2/3 are excellent and very cohesive however.
What's Kaplan's argument, being a journalist and writer who spent the 90s in West Africa, the FATA tribal region, the Balkans etc. ?
Nations exist to provide security and safety for their people, and in the developing world too many people are being offered votes rather than the prospective of a better life. He argues democracy cannot be roled out successfully without there already being a decent sized literate middle class, and a collective shared national identity to underpin it. Various examples of tottering democracies sliding back into misrule are cited. Kaplan argues that safer and better for most of the world are hybrid regimes which have elements of both democracy and authoritarian military governance. He warns that economic regionalism within large countries, increased ethnic or religious tensions and a lack of patriotism eventually cause Balkanisation, and the book's title comes from his view that this could be the future of the United States. In writing warning of the prospect of secession and civil war in the US in the 90s he was well ahead of his time, but no one is laughing at him now.
I always enjoy Kaplan when he discusses human rights and the idea of international progress. He's a complete realist, and emphasises that bad actors couldn't care less about international law and the proclamations of the likes of the U.N. At one point he baldly states that Nuremburg and similar will not prevent the next Holocaust.
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DRACUL proving a bit disappointing, very slow, and not that scary, despite starting well.
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About a third of DRACUL left, it's definitely warming up, and the origin story of Dacre Stoker's vampire, the "Dearg Due" is quite compelling I must say, a story within a story. How he took so long to get here, however, I have no idea.
The Hellfire Club features, it's all quite well executed.
Not sure what I will go to next.
I wanted to read Dickens A CHRISTMAS CAROL but I fear I have left it too late now.
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Started reading THE HIGH HOUSE by Jessie Greengrass, which I guess is kind of post-apocalypse literature in the vein of Colson Whitehead and Emily St John. SF for people who think they wouldn't like SF maybe.
Still working away on DRACUL which is improving every chapter in terms of story progression, but still not knocking my socks off, which is unfortunate.
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Finished DRACUL finally.
A bit disappointing, and certainly a book of its time in that the "twist", which was signposted from fairly early on, is that there is a faction of 'good' vampires opposing Dracula. We're told that one hasn't killed a human in 200 years, and another never has and never will.
When vampirism is depicted as 'just' a disease I can understand how the moral element is somewhat subdued and its possible you could have a vampire that sates its lusts without killing, but part of the Stoker mythos is that these are beings damned by God, they're meant to literally be godforsaken evil monsters who can't stand crosses and are burned by holy water.
I don't really see how a modern desire to show "not all monsters" squares with that, it's a bit silly really. I kept thinking of TWILLIGHT.
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THE HIGH HOUSE .... Flying through it.
It's a very well-observed book when it comes to family life. I'm not familiar with the author's background, but there is a baby character in it called Pauly, and the observations about early childhood development and behaviour are absolutely spot on.
When an author gets something like this correct it can have the effect of making the rest of the narrative somehow more credible, a sort of halo effect.
The timelines in THE HIGH HOUSE are vague, but the plot is set at a point where the UK-based narrator is observing the rest of the world slide into climate chaos. Islands are going under water, and the UN is awash with claims for redress and requests for the mass relocation of refugees. I guess 15-20 years down the line? I don't really know.
It's a 'cosy catastrophe' such as John Wyndham would have written in that the main characters have their well-stocked HIGH HOUSE, a redoubt to which they retire, as the rest of the world sinks.
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Really enjoying A CHRISTMAS CAROL... Ended up going for it, and I'm about halfway through.
From what I read online it seems fashionable to bash Dickens, I see people saying his novels are too long (By what standard?) or that it's like 'wading through treacle', reading him... (Try something genuinely challenging and then report back...).
A CHRISTMAS CAROL is definitely on the more accessible side, being a novella, really, but I think it defeats any criticism other than those who suggest Dickens is sentimental or maudlin. To which I would say, we can't be too cool for school... Christmas is a time for being sentimental.
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Finished THE HIGH HOUSE and ACC. Both very good. Grim ending to THE HIGH HOUSE. Highlights the long term futility of individual survival if it means total survival I guess.
I'm revisiting some classics, started with Plutarch's LIVES. Themistocles, Pericles, Alcibiades...
Also for more might reading, David Gemmell's SWORD IN THE STORM. Damn he was good.
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Listening to Plutarch's LIVES, and also having in mind Thucydides and Xenophon, the picture that I've developed of Greece keeps sharpening. It's hard to keep everything straight, the first few runs through.
Finished SWORD IN THE STORM and MIDNIGHT FALCON by David Gemmell and on to A HISTORY OF HEAVY METAL by Andrew O Neill.
Blighted by the self regard of a third tier stand up comic. I actually wanted a proper history of heavy metal, not affected Terry Prachett style prose. There's only one TP and sadly he is no more.
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I was amazed when I read Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. (Which also gelled with a book about the Greeks written by a pop-Nietzchean author that I read around the same time.)
Particularly the account of where some Spartan soldiers had a chance to sneak up and sink an Athenian war ship and win the war early on but they lost their nerve and couldn't do it. Then another accounts where Spartans were in-fighting berating each other as cowards back home.
Even though we think of the Spartans as ultra-brave it seems that was aspirational. They wanted to be the bravest and that obsession makes such an impression on us.
If it had been a group of Gaels or Scots-Irish soldiers they would have probably held their nerve better. Thus we ourselveves are probably closer to how we think of the Spartans than the way the Spartans were.
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When you look at these texts there's no doubt some prominent Spartans are far from always living up to Lycyrgus' laws. We have examples of Agis, Lysander and others acting with less than selfless valor in mind.
But in a society like the Spartans it does stand to reason that of course the cases of corruption would continue to live in infamy whereas it might be less likely elsewhere. Maybe if only marginally.
Clearly not the super soldiers of popular culture but heavy hitters all the same. I suspect a quasi modern parallel would be with South Africa or Rhodesia under apartheid. Similar social dynamics and producing a minority of tough citizens presiding over a brutal regime of forced labour.
I don't know enough about Gaelic or Scots Irish soldiers to comment on who would have who, but it's difficult to compare eras with different technology, topography, tactics etc. All these City state hoplites were highly effective in their day, there's no doubt. Donald Kagan and Victor Davis Hanson tie it to their being invested as franchise holders, and prepared to act in disciplined professional formations. Some good accounts exist of what brave tribal peoples thought when confronted with a phalanx on the battlefield.
Even today professional citizen soldiers are still #1. No matter how macho the culture of a country, if their armies are conscripts or mercenaries they are not going to perform at the same level.
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A HISTORY OF HEAVY METAL has picked up somewhat... I think just a weak opening. Now it's in full flow and I suppose the joy of this book is that I'm discovering, in the course of reading it, bands which I would never ever have sought out otherwise... Turns out I really like 'British New Wave Heavy Metal'...
Just beginning a chapter on Black Metal, a subject I know nothing about other than later on it involved burning churches in Scandinavia, and again turns out some of the early bands are actually very listen-able.
Venom have some banging tunes, I don't know whether Metallica were inspired by them in any way, but the vocals really remind me of early James Hetfield.
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ELANTRIS by Brandon Sanderson. Love a good stand alone fantasy novel sometimes!
Strong opening.
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About halfway through ELANTRIS.
It's such a lazy comment to say that Sanderson "does world building well" but it's a trope because it's true. ELANTRIS and the concept of this magical illness afflicting its denizens feels like something timeless, it could have been from the plot of a fantasy novel in any past decade (Perhaps the further back the more likely..).
I've read well-articulated criticisms that too little happens in his novels, but I've never found that's the case. There are many cinema-worthy action scenes (Perhaps in his other series more than ELANTRIS though) and there is always a progression happening...
...But there's a lot of filler. It's fair to say Sanderson is not as good at dialogue as he thinks he is, and his characters are - if not two dimensional - not that rivetting without the broader scenario and world they inhabit to bolster the reader's attention.
Some of the things he focuses in on to revisit, like a character's quirks or inability to paint or whatever it is, feel tired after a paragraph or two, but Sanderson returns to them again and again, with warm affection, perhaps imagining the reader chuckling along with him. If some of this material was excised the novels - including ELANTRIS - would become significantly leaner, although they could never be as short as those of days past.
But if you zoom out, Sanderson is worthwhile.
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I've just finished reading Trans so I hope it's okay to drop in again and give my two cents.
Knowing the authors views I wasn't expecting much but in fairness it was an interesting read.
However, it was hard going given her one-sided, nay lopsided, view of all things trans.
From the get-go she dismisses transgenderism as nothing more than ideology and maintains this dismissiveness throughout.
All trans-activism is deemed somehow underhand and sinister while the activism of those pushing against it is roundly lauded.
Whether it's funding, publicity or campaigning - one side is all wrong and the other is all right.
And the book is so littered with projection, contradiction, inconsistency and bad faith argument that it undermines the authors credibility.
Yet when it comes to the concluding chapter the combative tone is dropped in favour of a much more conciliatory one.
It's a shame the whole book wasn't written in this manner as the general reader would have been far better served had it been thus.
But for all that it begs further reading and that's never a bad thing.
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Thanks for your views Hermy.
I'm going from memory here but although Helen Joyce does set out the origin of gender identity theory - the ideology, if you like - she does also discuss the possible psychological and social reasons people identify as transgender.
As you know from the book, she notes historical examples of crossdressing and pre and post op transsexuals but argues that the modern trans community has evolved to become something new.
TRANS covers the psychological condition of gender dysphoria among teenage girls, but links it to a variety of possibly interlinked causes... Societal misogyny, discomfort with being homosexual in some cases, normal intense discomfort with their bodies due to puberty, and IIRC she mentions additional questions around the high rates of autism evident, and amount of clustering among teenage female populations.
She dwells on it less but she also alludes to autogynephilia and males who become transgender.
I personally feel that looking to psychological explainers of this phenomenon does not mean it is being dismissed as "just" a choice (certainly not just an ideological decision someone makes), I could be wrong but suspect Joyce would be of the same view.
I have another book on gender ideology to read at some point, Kathleen Stocks' MATERIAL GIRLS: WHY REALITY MATTERS FOR FEMINISM but I have a book backlog that's three shelves long at this point, so I'm not sure when I will get to it.
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I'm on the home stretch with ELANTRIS and after this I think I'll pivot to something non fiction or historical.
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I should mention as well that I'm building a library of Everyman's Library hardbacks.
I want to have a good library built up that will stand the test of time.
So far I've been looking to the classics in this thread and identifying stand-out works as good places to begin. I have about 4 so far, couldn't begin anywhere other than with a copy of THE ILIAD and THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO!
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I pre-ordered TIME TO THINK: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE COLLAPSE OF THE TAVISTOCK'S GENDER SERVICE FOR CHILDREN by Hannah Barnes (BBC Newsnight). Another one for the to-read pile.
Mainly on the strength of the Sunday Times coverage today:-
More than 1,000 children were referred for puberty blockers at an experimental gender clinic where concerns were ignored to preserve a “gold dust” NHS contract, a new book claims.
Former clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, have detailed how some “incredibly complex” children were placed on medication after one face-to-face assessment, despite many having a variety of mental health or family background problems.
More than a third of young people referred to the service had moderate to severe autistic traits, compared with fewer than 2 per cent of children in the general population. Some identified not just as a different gender, but a different ethnic background, such as Japanese or Korean. One young person had “three different alter egos, two of whom spoke in an Australian accent”.
In the book, former clinicians at the Gids service speak for the first time in detail of their “regret” about the practice of routinely referring under-16s for puberty-blocking and cross-hormone treatment with no concrete data on the long-term effects. They compare it to the Mid Staffs hospital scandal of the 2000s and the doping of East German athletes in the 1960s and 1970s.
The claims come in Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes, which will be released this month.
Barnes, a BBC Newsnight journalist, spoke to dozens of clinicians who worked at Gids, governors at the trust and children and their parents who used the service.
She details how:
• Children as young as three, already living as the opposite gender with a changed name, appearance and pronouns, were referred to the service.
• The clinic accounted for almost 30 per cent of the Tavistock NHS Trust’s income by 2021 and staff said it resembled a “tech start-up” with regular trips to international conferences.
• In 2016, Susie Green, former head of the pro-trans charity Mermaids, emailed Dr Polly Carmichael, who was then the head of Gids, asking to cut the time children had to spend on puberty blockers before irreversible cross-sex hormones could be introduced.
• Staff raised concerns when, on behalf of families, Green requested children’s clinicians to be changed to someone believed to be more likely to prescribe hormones.
• In her first interview since winning an employment tribunal case after she raised concerns about the safety of children, the trust’s head of safeguarding, Sonia Appleby, said anyone who spoke out was “demonised”.
• Former therapists involved in prescribing puberty blockers now admit they do not know “how many children [have since] changed their mind” on transitioning.
Founded in 1989, Gids, formerly the UK’s only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people, was told to shut last year after an independent review led by Dr Hilary Cass concluded that young people were left at “considerable risk” of poor mental health and distress. A Care Quality Commission report had rated the service “inadequate” and criticised its record-keeping.
Data shows 354 children under 16 consented to puberty blockers at University College London Hospital Trust and Leeds Children’s Hospital between 2012 and 2021 after being seen by therapists and psychologists at the clinic. Between 2009 and 2017, 1,261 children and teenagers were referred for medical intervention. Gids said the “vast majority” were prescribed the blocker.
After initially treating just a handful of patients each year, referrals to Gids increased dramatically. In 2009-10 it received 97. By 2019-20 it received 2,748 — a rise of more than 2,700 per cent. The youngest child known to have been referred to endocrinologists at the University College London Hospital Trust was seven. The child was later treated privately.
The numbers far exceeded what had been planned for and many staff members felt overwhelmed.
Therapists who worked at the clinic have spoken of staff trying to do the best for young people but assessments quickly began to feel rushed. A number of young people have reported that they felt Gids staff listened to them and have spoken positively of their treatment there.
But Dr Anna Hutchinson, a senior clinical psychologist at Gids, said the service was soon “accepting everyone”. She said puberty blockers were supposed to be prescribed to children to give them “time to think” about whether they wanted to transition fully, but she realised that almost all went on to take cross-sex hormones, such as testosterone and oestrogen, which have irreversible consequences.
Hutchinson told Barnes this was a “holy f***” moment. “It totally exploded the idea that when we were offering the puberty blockers, we were actually offering time to think,” she said.
"Because what are the chances of 100 per cent of people, offered time to think, thinking the same thing? If the service was getting this wrong, it was getting it wrong with some of the most vulnerable children and young people.”
She now believes that “some of those kids would not have identified as trans had they not been put on the medical pathway”.
“Of course, that doesn’t mean to say that identifying as trans is a bad outcome,” she said. “But what is a bad outcome is creating a cohort of people who are medically dependent who’d never needed to be. And not only medically dependent, but perhaps — we don’t yet know — medically damaged.”
She describes the service as “scandalous in its negligence and scale”.
In 2011, Gids began an “early intervention” study in which 44 patients aged 12 to 15 took part to see the longer-term effects of puberty blockers. But in April 2014 the practice of prescribing blockers to under-16s was introduced across the service before the data on their effects was available. A lower age limit of 12 was removed as Gids relied on a “stage, not age” approach based on where a child was in their development.
There are concerns about whether puberty blockers “temporarily or permanently” disrupt the development of children’s brains, as well as potentially stunting growth and affecting bone strength. Little is known about the long-term side effects.
Anastassis Spiliadis, a family therapist, told Barnes of the impact of outside groups, and parents, on decisions to refer often vulnerable children for puberty blockers.
He said in his four years at the service, on two occasions he decided that children from complex family set-ups and backgrounds should not be placed on blockers. However, the families complained and “both ended up on the blocker”.
Parents who complained were referred to “clinicians who we all knew it was much easier to get on hormones through them, rather than other clinicians”, he said.
There were also concerns that parents were pushing children into transitioning, in cases of fabricated or induced illness (FII), previously known as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.
In one case, he said, the child told him, “my mum wants this for me”, or “my mum wants the blocker more than I do”. He said there was sexual abuse and domestic violence in the family and he and a colleague agreed that they would not be putting the young person forward for puberty blockers. However, this decision was allegedly overruled by Carmichael.
On other occasions a change in clinician would be requested by Green, the Mermaids chief, Spiliadis said.
“I remember thinking and talking to Paul [Jenkins, the Tavistock chief] and saying that this is really inappropriate — how come a person who’s the director, or the CEO of a charity, is entitled to request a change of clinicians on behalf of a family?”
On his time at Gids, Spiliadis added: “We’re like, ‘Oh my God, will we look back in ten, 20 years and be like, what did we do?’”
Matt Bristow, a former Gids clinician, added: “Despite the obvious complexity of all these cases — sexual abuse, trauma, potential FII — the answer was always the same. That the young people eventually get put on the blocker unless they themselves say they don’t want it.”
Whistleblowers also allege the clinic, which treated under-18s suffering from gender dysphoria, was “institutionally homophobic” and bowed to pressure from parents who preferred their children to be transgender rather than gay. When homosexual clinicians raised concerns it was becoming a “conversion therapy for gay kids”, they were ignored because they were deemed subjective, it is claimed.
Barnes’s book refers to the financial benefits the Gids service brought to the Tavistock trust at a time when NHS services were under immense financial pressure.
Dr David Bell, a psychiatrist and former staff governor at the trust who wrote a critical report on the service in 2019 after being approached by a number of concerned employees, said the Gids national contract with the NHS — where it did not have to compete with another service — was “gold dust”.
Dr David Bell said concerns were kept quiet because of Gids’s financial benefits
Dr David Bell said concerns were kept quiet because of Gids’s financial benefits
“Bell argued that knowledge of Gids’s economic importance had made it difficult for those with legitimate criticisms to raise them,” Barnes writes.
Spiliadis added that, after not even having an office when he arrived, Gids “eventually took over a whole floor”. “But because it was bringing in so much money they [senior trust staff] could not challenge it,” he added.
Hutchinson said that with high pay, trips to transgender conferences in Europe and as far afield as Buenos Aires, the culture of Gids “more closely resembled a tech start-up than the NHS”.
As well as criticisms, a 2019 review by the medical director, Dinesh Sinha, following Bell’s report also heard positive testimony from staff members, who said they did not see any problems with Gids’ safeguarding practices.
But Sinha did not raise concerns passed to him during the course of his review with Appleby, the safeguarding head. When she finally saw the transcripts she said it was not only a “tragedy for the patients involved” but a “tragedy for the organisation — that so many of these narratives had been muzzled, and the people who had raised these concerns were demonised”.
Bristow said Sinha’s report was a “whitewash”.
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust said: “Gids works on a case-by-case basis with every young person and their family, working thoughtfully and holistically with them to explore their situation, with no expectation of what the right outcome for them might be. Only the minority of young people seen in the service are referred for any physical interventions. At the Tavistock and Portman we wholeheartedly support our staff to raise concerns, and have recently strengthened our mechanisms for doing so. Concerns relating to young people’s wellbeing are taken seriously and investigated.”
The Tavistock said it had records of only one patient being referred for medical intervention after one assessment and this person had gone through a detailed assessment at another gender service.
Mermaids declined to comment.
I'm not sure whether which whistleblower claim I find more depressing:-
That some parents of UK trans kids may have been motivated by homophobia in pressuring their kids to be trans rather than simply gay... And that this was possibly entertained by clinicians...
Or the fact that the Tavistock GIDS clinic simply became so profitable that no one critically evaluated what was going on.... There are many examples of how capitalism can interface with healthcare in a catastrophic way, but this is right up there for me.
The Irish edition of the Sunday Times has this Irish-focused piece--
Doctors in Ireland’s National Gender Service worry that young patients will suffer “significant regret” after “problem assessments” over gender identity treatment.
A new book, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, looks at the troubles around the UK’s flagship gender service for children, based in London.
The author, Hannah Barnes, a BBC journalist, devoted a chapter to Ireland’s care model. She interviewed Dr Paul Moran and Professor Donal O’Shea, clinicians at the National Gender Service (NGS), who fear that children have transitioned unsafely and too quickly.
In 2012 the HSE referred the few Irish youngsters who questioned their gender identities to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, London.
The numbers grew and by 2015, for logistical reasons, Gids clinicians were advising at Children’s Health Ireland in Crumlin. Moran said: “Endocrinologists started noticing that these people were experiencing a lot of problems. A lot of them weren’t ready for this. Generally, what would happen is the endocrinologist would contact me saying, ‘Listen, I’ve got this kid here, we took him over from Crumlin and he looks very unwell, depressed, or he’s self-harming.’ That’s when we started to notice there’s a problem here with the assessments.”
He says that in many cases CHI Crumlin did not hold the children’s records. Where records were held, Moran and O’Shea grew alarmed.
Highlighting the “red flags”, O’Shea said life-changing decisions had been rushed. “The social situation was so chaotic that the idea that you would just jump in with hormones and start treating, without social work input, without liaising with the school, the key worker, you know, it was clearly potty,” he said.
Several of the children had severe autism or problems such as non-attendance at school or mental health issues, or they had experienced homophobia.
O’Shea added: “It is likely we will encounter significant levels of regret and other adverse outcomes in the Crumlin legacy group which will be difficult to defend.”
Moran said the concerns raised by the NHS and himself were “ignored” by Irish health authorities. Dr Polly Carmichael, the director of Gids, said in the book that the service did not receive “direct complaints” from the NGS about quality of referrals.
The HSE said Hilary Cass, who reviewed the work of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, met Irish stakeholders in Dublin on Thursday.
It said: “The HSE is committed to developing a seamless and integrated service for those with gender identity issues.”
CHI Crumlin did not respond to requests for comment.
Post edited by Black Sheep on0
