We're back north of the border, where they do things differently:
Staff at Scotland’s youth gender clinic say they are struggling to deal with surging numbers of children who identify as neither male nor female.
A warning about the rise in “non-binary” patients was raised as part of a review into the impact of government spending on trans healthcare. However, workers at the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow highlighted a lack of guidance on how they should be looked after.
One health professional revealed that some young “non-binary” patients who say they do not belong to either gender still request sex hormones that would either feminise or masculinise them.
It's almost as though, rather than genuine problems, these patients are anxious young adolescents in the grip of a social contagion about not conforming to rigid sexist stereotypes, so have come to the delusional belief that they must be non-binary or trans or whatever.
The employee said: “We’re following a 2012 protocol that doesn’t talk at all about non-binary people, which is actually becoming a much bigger proportion of our cases.
“And [there are] non-binary people asking for hormones, but of course hormones are only either feminising or masculinising. So how does that fit for a person who identifies as non-binary?”
It doesn't. It's all nonsense.
Those who do not conform to male or female categories have become “more difficult to manage” because of the lack of guidance and NHS pathways for them, another member of the youth team told the review.
“Over the last ten years, obviously there’s been a big increase in the number of people presenting [with] gender non-conforming identities … we’ve really struggled to think about how we deal with that in a fair way,” the staff member said.
Over the last three years SNP ministers have spent £9 million on gender identity healthcare and the review was commissioned to assess the impact on services. A total of £3.6 million was apportioned to lead to improvements.
One consultant who has worked in gender healthcare told The Times they had encountered patients who shifted genders depending on how they felt on different days. “We have got into a position where we are enabling people to deny reality and we have reinforced delusional behaviours,” the consultant said.
Well yes. Exactly. And who's behind all this?
According to the review the Scottish government funding had seen improvements to staffing and “deepened collaborations with LGBT Youth Scotland”. Earlier this year the Scottish Conservatives called for all public funding to be withdrawn from this charity after concerns were raised that it was “normalising” self-harm. The Scottish Charity Regulator investigated fears about its stance on cutting with blades but was satisfied action had been taken to address any issues.
Of course. LGBT Youth Scotland. A reminder, from Janice Turner last year:
In 2009 eight men were convicted of running the most depraved child sex ring in Scottish history. Besides sharing the worst categories of dark web paedophile abuse, they fantasised about gaining access to a real child.
One of them, James Rennie, was trusted to babysit his godson, the child of university friends. So, starting when the boy was three months old, Rennie filmed himself sexually abusing the child then shared videos with the other men, even suggesting it would be “hotter” if they came along to join in. Rennie, who was given a life sentence, was the head of LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS), joining the charity in 1997 and becoming chief executive in 2003. Rennie’s trial heard that he often accessed his special sex ring Hotmail account “kplover” (kiddy porn lover) at work.
You’d expect the Scottish Charity Regulator to launch an inquiry to ascertain whether Rennie had access to vulnerable young people, or how being led for years by a predatory paedophile had affected office culture and safeguarding. But it did not. Nor did the police forces that had exposed the sex ring investigate LGBTYS. Both accepted its internal investigation which concluded that everything was fine.
Even more extraordinary, seven months after Rennie was jailed, BBC Children in Need decided to award, for the first time, a grant of £24,000 to LGBTYS. The charity turns down 90 per cent of good causes that apply for funding, yet money raised by BBC viewers was given to a charity whose outgoing chief executive sexually abused a baby….
Mick Hartley 