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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Yeah, that's fair: if you're specifically talking about just them, they do seem to be a bit of a mill compared to even other gender therapy-specialized places, especially for younger patients.

Two points: First, I want to restate this is just counting referrals. The amount of times someone goes to the doctor saying "hey doc, my kid says they're the other gender", and the doctor sends them to Tavistock. How the clinic processes them is another matter, in theory they could send them all away saying they don't meet the criteria for the diagnosis. It's possible that if they're a mill, that encourages more people to come to them, but I don't know if we can assume it's a direct causation.

Second, no I'm not talking about just Tavistock. They're a convenient source because they cover the whole country, and have good book keeping that they have to share with the public, getting comprehensive data like that from the US would be a lot more complicated. Also from the size and structure of the country, I'll be happy to concede there's a much larger variance in approaches in the US, so probably there are also many clinics there that are unreasonably restrictive. With all that said, my position is that in the West we have a systemic problem with promoting transition as a cure for all problems for a certain type of person, and waving them through the pipeline without much questioning.

Until recently, I think we had a similar view on the topic: gender dysphoria is a real thing, living with is a horrible experience, and the best way we came up to help people who suffer from it is transition. That's absolutely fine, as long we put a lot of effort into ensuring that is actually the best way forward for the person, and I've seen a few too many pictures of adolescent girls showing off their double mastectomies to believe that this is what we're doing. Combined with my anecdotal experience of a friends daughter being nudged to HRT at the age of 13 without exploring any other potential causes of her problems (this isn't day one HRT, but she's 13, for the love of god), combined with the recent happenings at WPATH, or the messaging in the media, or the various pro-Trans laws being passed the West... I think it's time to slam the breaks hard.

Or are we actually still on the same page? You mentioned swinging too far in the other direction, are you just afraid the swing back is going to be too hard as well? I understand the fear, but I don't know what we can do about it. We could probably work out a reasonable compromise very quickly between the two of us, but literally no one will listen to us.