5 Comments
May 1, 2021Liked by Angus Fox

Great interview!❤️

FYI an interview ( which Stella alerted me to on one of her postings somewhere out there....)with Buckangel and a young trans person uncertain about medical choices made beginning at age 13 and now living with resulting health issues, has been blocked on Instagram. Why would anyone block the possible, and horrific consequences on the health of young people exploring this path? Where will they, or their parents find this information?

Expand full comment

Fascinating interview! Such a helpful addition to discussions about ROGD in boys. I had not come across Sacha Ayad and Stella O'Malley's YouTube Channel, "Gender - A Wider Lens". I am going to be binge-watching now!

Some of the things that jumped out at me from the discussion:

1) The lack of "cognitive male role-models".

I am not sure if that was the exact wording that you used, but it summoned up the image of what we used to call "brain boxes". The Bamber Gascoigne's of this world?

For both boys and girls, in fiction you can't do much better than key characters in the Harry Potter series. Might that be why JK Rowling's contributions to the "sex and gender debate" led to such massive melt-downs in the "trans community"?

2) "Dotty professors".

You did not use this term but it is what sprang to mind when you talked about the intellectuals who cannot be trusted to take off their bicycle clips, grown up versions of the "brainy" boys who score zero on the Street-wise Scale and can't kick a ball for toffee.

3) Suburban vs Urban Environments and Risk Taking.

Very interesting observation that children in the suburbs do not have a mental map of their surroundings because they are driven everywhere.

I have noticed this as an adult. I have lived in urban areas where it is not safe to stroll on foot or there is nothing much to look at architecturally and I have been aware that I do not have a mental map of the neighbourhood - and it feels wrong.

It made me think of previous "gender-bending" periods in my living memory. Bowie and others talked about their "escape from the suburbs", the dullness, lack of entertainment for kids, middle-class conformity.

There are kids in rural areas and villages who are also sucked into "transitioning" via the internet but I suspect that they will be more in touch with their physical environment.

4) Class, affluence and poverty.

These were not mentioned as possible factors except that you all stated that there was a wide diversity of families where the parents (usually mums) signed up for therapy. Am I out of date in suspecting that most of the families would be, at the very least, "comfortably off"?

What made me alert to this possibility is the contrast with an observation made by Kirsty Entwhistle in "An Open Letter to Polly Carmichael from a former GIDS clinician" (Jul 18, 2019):

"I also felt that was an overrepresentation of the young people who were living in poverty. I had a young person whose family were living within such extreme financial constraints that he considered it a treat to buy a can of pop. I also had another young person who was living in a very complex and unstable arrangement who arrived to sessions in a poor state of hygiene and said that there wasn’t money for hygiene products. How is it ethical to undertake a gender identity assessment with the view to a medical pathway when there are children and young people do not have their most basic needs met?"

https://archive.is/icStX#selection-1305.0-1305.425

In a comment on that specific point in Entwhistle's article:

"Well of course there was, as generally in specialist NHS services. Because of the underresourcing, the waiting times are terrible, so those who can afford to go private, do."

https://archive.ph/5wkYI#selection-411.0-411.172

5) Psychotherapeutic approaches used with the boys

This was not covered in this video but I wondered if Personal Construct Psychology techniques might be relevant? There was something about the description of the boys that jolted my memory about PCP. I have done a massive amount of reading, and watching and listening, about gender dysphoria and "transgenderism" in the last two years and I am surprised that PCP has not occurred to me before now.

Disclaimer: PCP is the only psychotherapeutic method that I have been trained in and it is many years since I have used it in practice.

===========

I think there were a couple of other things that jumped out at me too - I should have made notes! Off to read your other articles and watch more "Wider Lens" videos in between Bank Holiday weeding.

Expand full comment

Fantastic YouTube Channel! That’s a podcast you’ve embedded so there are no links. This is the Channel URL:

https://youtube.com/channel/UCP62aWWtlZV1oVnbMhTRBcg

Expand full comment