Mick Hartley

The UK and the US are moving in opposite directions on the gender front. Here the NHS is finally seeing sense on trans treatment for children after the Cass Report and the closure of the Tavistock Clinic. Biden, on the other hand, is fully committed to the whole gender cult, welcoming trans woman and super girlie Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, and branding any attempts to stop immediate affirmation of supposedly gender dysphoric children as “outrageous” and “immoral”. He's presenting it – as indeed much US opinion is presenting it – as good progressive Dems versus nasty reactionary Republicans, though it's hard to see what's so progressive about the irreversible medicalisation and mutilation of troubled young teens who find themselves caught up in the latest social contagion. But that's where we are at the moment.

As an example, take the world-renowned Boston Children's Hospital. We saw a couple of months back a BCH doctor informing us that “playing with the opposite gender toys is a sign your child is transgender". Instead of, you know, just not conforming to rigid gender stereotypes.

Then there's Dr Spack:

The co-founder of the pediatric gender identity clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital admitted to giving feminizing hormone therapy to a 13-year-old child during a lecture in 2013. This is just the latest in a slew of disturbing news coming from the clinic related to transitioning extremely young children.

Boston Children’s Hospital played a crucial role in pioneering the use of drugs to halt children’s puberty in North America.

Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist, co-founded the hospital’s Gender Multispeciality Service (formerly the Gender Management Service) in February 2007.

In a TED Talk lecture he gave in 2013, Dr. Spack talks of halting children’s puberty beginning as early as 10 years old….

Dr. Spack went on to advocate for the necessity of prescribing puberty blockers and estrogen to young boys so that they can grow up to be “beautiful,” highlighting two instances in which he had done so. Dr. Spack tells of meeting “Jackie,” a 12-year-old male child from Britain, and placing him on estrogen by 13 years old.

Jackie’s mother, Susie Green, had sought out medical intervention for her child in the United States because it was illegal to do so for minors under the age of 16 in the United Kingdom.

That's Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids. So we have BCH to thank, indirectly, for Mermaids.

Now here's Debbie Hayton today in The Critic:

Boston Children’s Hospital has a proud reputation. In 2022, US News and World Report ranked it the number one paediatric hospital in the United States. In response, the hospital recognised “the trust our patients and their families place in us when they choose Boston Children’s”.

With that trust comes great responsibility. But in a series of now deleted videos about transgender-identified children, BCH clinicians made some astonishing claims. For example, psychologist Kerry McGregor suggested that:

Most of the patients that we have in the GeMS [Gender Multispecialty Service] clinic actually know their gender usually around the age of puberty, but a good portion of children do know as early as seemingly from the womb.

Really? As calming music played in the background, McGregor insisted that children can express their gender identity “as soon as they can talk”. Parents were advised to “just be supportive”. Supportive of what, exactly? Unfortunately, that was not explained. Instead, McGregor continued, “Sometimes you might not understand; sometimes you feel you don’t know the terms, or you don’t get exactly what the child means when they say they might be this gender.”

The message was uncompromising — the child knows their gender identity. But what is gender identity, and what does it mean to be transgender? In another BCH video, clinic director Jeremi Carswell MD suggested that transgender could be an “umbrella term” for a “person who identifies other than the gender that would normally be associated with their birth assigned sex”. For someone who “might have been born with ovaries”, Carswell added, “being transgender might be anywhere on the spectrum of being slightly less female to all the way to male”.

This is fanciful nonsense. Human beings are indeed like other mammals; we are female or male according to our reproductive biology. There is a word for people born with ovaries, and it is female — not “slightly less female”, and certainly not male. Astonishingly, Carswell is reported to be a paediatric endocrinologist — a doctor specialising in the hormone regimes of children.

The website of the clinic states that, “in children, puberty-blocking hormones can suppress the physical changes associated with puberty until they and their parents are ready to affirm their gender”. When adolescents have “passed puberty”, the clinic noted that “hormones can help encourage the development of gender affirming physical traits”.

In other videos, physical approaches are discussed. Nurse Sarah Picher talked about breast binding. “A lot of my patients who identify as transgender male, or non-binary or male leaning [sic] like to do that.” Pilcher did not mention the study that reported negative outcomes in 97 per cent of 1800 adult women who experienced binding. Instead, she glibly recommended “measuring correctly” and not wearing the binder for more than 10 hours each day.

A children's hospital recommending breast binding? We're right down the rabbit hole here.

And then there are – of course – the pronouns:

Want some advice on pronouns? In another BCH video Dr Elizabeth Boskey asserted that, “one of the things that [is] really important to people in the way that they feel seen is for people to respect their pronouns”. Boskey — a social worker — declared herself to be a “cis-woman” and a user of “she/her/hers pronouns”. She was clear; it was “not cool” to ask pronouns only of people suspected to be trans. Better, she suggested, to introduce yourself using your pronouns.

At least the videos have now been deleted – but still….what were they doing there in the first place?