Pity the Children
Just who are the kids caught up in the gender affirming nightmare?
Medical research papers can be long, boring and a bit like a game of cricket. At the end, there could be no result, a draw or a wash-out. There could also be an ending that states there is more research needed. If this was how it was in cricket, a game could last years.
Sometimes though, the paper can contain information that non-medical types - usually the media or activist groups don’t like. Often, they’ll only read the abstract because to read the whole thing … well … is hard work. It also takes time and young, career driven journalists are so pushed by deadline and click-bait expectations that there’s just no room for analysis.
One fairly recent medical paper has been completely dismissed word-wide, not because it isn’t any good, but because it questions Australia’s, and the world’s use of affirming treatment of gender dysphoric children.
It looks at gender dysphoric children, their families and their introduction to a large children’s hospital in the Sydney suburb of Westmead. It analyses their background, what mum and dad are like and where they got their pre-hospital information.
Written by six authors with impeccable credentials, it provides a great insight into who exactly these kids are. Lead author Kasia Kozlowska should be congratulated.
It asks - “Just who are these kids?”
When taken together with the 2017 Australian Trans pathway study and the 2020 report. When looking at a mean (average) between the two studies, it waves a glaringly obvious red flag to medical practitioners, educators and politicians about the dangers of gender affirming treatment. The red flag signals the multiple other problems these children have that are totally separate, yet contribute to gender confusion. It’s a red flag that has been ignored.
It’s been ignored by mainstream media in Australia because it asks questions of gender ideology. It’s been ignored by education departments because of the same reason. Both the media and education bureaucracies have been overtaken by trans-extremists hiding behind the LGB letters of the rainbow flag -a flag that is fast splintering.
I’ve worked in the medical field and plowed my way through many long research papers. My job at the University of NSW was really to make complex ideas simple; to hunt for the important bits; to establish the gist. I thought hunting for the important points from this study compared with the pathway research may help those not wanting to wade through long reports.
The entire Westmead paper however, is attached. It’s fully shareable so if anyone needs the full version rather that the major points, share away.
My additional comments are labeled in bold as ‘PD’ and will often contain comparisons to the Australian Trans Pathways Study of 859 14-25 year old trans youth.
Major point 1: Who did they study?
The study was on 79 gender dysphoric children presenting at the hospital aged between 8.4 - 15.9 years old
Patient traits leading to gender confusion
33 biological males (42% of the cohort) | 46 biological females (58% of the cohort). The Trans Pathway Study found that only 25.6% of their cohort was male while 74.4% were female.
41.8% had thoughts about suicide
10% had attempted suicide [The Australian trans pathway study found 48.1%]
16.3% thought about self-harm. [The Australian trans pathway study found 79.7%]
63.3% had anxiety [The Australian trans pathway study found 72.2%]
62% had depression [The Australian trans pathway study found 74.6%]
35.4 had behavioural disorders
13.9% had autism [The pathways study found 22.5% had autism]
PD:
It’s clear that most of these children were not well-adjusted and had a variety of other problems contributing to the label of ‘gender dysphoria’. However, they were significantly ‘more well’ than the cohort researched in the Trans Pathway Study. The question for both the media and educators is …
“Were all of these mental conditions addressed or researched further before gender affirming treatment began?”
Major point 2: Family profile
65.8% of these children had experienced family conflict
63.3% had a parent or parents with mental illness
59.5% had lost important figures through separation
54.4% had been bullied
39.2% had experiences of childhood abuse (The trans pathway research found 57.9% had experienced abuse)
19% had experienced childhood sexual abuse (32% of the Trans Pathway Study had experienced childhood sexual abuse)
Child Protection Authorities had been involved with over half of the families.
PD:
It’s clear that most of these children had family profiles which produced stress. The telling statistic that 63.3% of the kids had a parent or parents with a mental illness is important. That such a large % had experienced childhood sexual abuse is also telling. The questions for both the media and educators are …
“Were these familial causes of stress investigated before gender affirming treatment began? Would the child still be experiencing maltreatment? How is the parent’s mental illness being treated? What does the Childhood protection report state?”
Major point 3: Living situation of the kids
Living with …
Bio mother and bio father 38.0% (national average = 84%)
Bio mother alone 26.6% (national average = 11.3%)
Bio mother (re-partnered) 17.7% (national average = 9% approx)
Bio father (re-partnered) 12.7% (national average = 9% approx)
Foster care 3.8%
Bio father alone 1.3%
The Trans Pathway Study, strangely, didn’t ask this question.
PD:
It’s clear that while the proportion of 2 x parent families are very under-represented compared to the national average, the number of children living with mum only (26.6%) is over-represented by more than double. Just over one quarter of the kids come from a family without dad about or where dad has minor influence. This is not representative of society in general where 11.3% of families are like this.
Major point 4: What did families expect?
77.2% of children and 70.9% of parents said that they were attending the clinic because they were seeking a referral for puberty-blockers.
88.6% of parents but only 41.8% of children were interested in a more holistic approach that included psychological support for the child and family.
In 11.5% of cases, the attending parent (usually the mother) reported that the child’s other parent was—or would be - strongly opposed to the child attending the Gender Clinic, and any interventions.
PD:
These stats are telling. It seems the kids and parents want an instant fix to what is a potentially an ongoing and multi-faceted issue. It also reflects a lack of responsibility and accountability by the parents in not looking at their child’s family environment as a cause.
That the parents and kids want puberty blockers is like going to a doctor with a cold and insisting the doctor removes the nose. Everything that’s left, the stuff causing the gender issue in the first place, is left untouched.
That gender affirming doctors prescribe puberty blockers when everything else is untreated or ignored is malpractice.
Major point 5: Important quotes from the study.
1.
“Our results suggest the need to bring into play a biopsychosocial, trauma-informed model of mental health care for children presenting with gender dysphoria. Ongoing therapeutic work needs to address unresolved trauma and loss, the maintenance of subjective well-being, and the development of the self.”
PD:
If this isn’t clear enough for the media, I don’t know what is.
2.
“…clinicians rated almost three-quarters of the families (73.4%) as presenting in a state of stress due to family conflict or perturbations to family function in the context of other ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). DASS scores confirmed the high levels of depression, anxiety, and stress felt by the children and their mothers”
PD:
So, gender dysphoria aside, nearly 3/4 of the families were in a state of stress due to other stuff. That gender affirming doctors disregard this is malpractice.
3.
”Despite the clinicians’ perspective that families presenting to the Gender Service were typically in substantial distress and struggled in many domains of family function—as evidenced by their stories of conflict, relationship breakdown, parental mental illness, and maltreatment (see Table 3)—the families themselves did not perceive themselves in this way (see Figure 2 and Table 6). The families did not seem to understand the possible connections between the family story — sometimes across generations — and the child’s clinical presentation with distress, anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria.Not surprisingly, families tended to medicalize the child’s distress, attributing it solely to gender dysphoria as an isolated phenomenon, with the consequence that the family identified the medical pathway as providing the only potential way forward. The motivation to engage in individual or family work to explore the broad range of difficulties and psychological, family, or loss/trauma issues contributing to the clinical picture was generally low”.
PD:
Once again, the pressure to medicalise the child and ignore the multitude of family considerations is malpractice. This is amplified in the following quote.
4.
”Very often, we the clinicians felt that our efforts to work from a biopsychosocial perspective, along with our therapeutic efforts to discuss different aspects of the medical situation, fell on deaf ears. Lost were our efforts to highlight the many different pathways in which gender variation could be expressed, to explain potential adverse effects of medical treatment, to explore issues pertaining to future fertility and child rearing, and to highlight the importance of ongoing psychotherapy”.
Major point 6: Social media and the trans-contagion
35.4% of the Westmead cohort reported that seeing information on the internet or via a documentary had contributed to their feeling of, “This is me”. In the Trans pathway Study, 74% of the cohort sought help from social media.
Another 7.6% reported using the internet to gain more information—often together with a parent—after they had disclosed their feelings of dysphoria.
PD:
As stated by Professor Dianna Kenny in Episode 4 of ‘Philtered: the Podcast’, the social contagion, fostered by a heavily trans-influenced media and education system, is largely responsible for what we are seeing.
Thankfully though, groups are fighting back. At the forefront is the Gay community who are distancing themselves from transgender ideology in a big way.
To finish …
Hopefully this has provided some easy-reading background about the sort of child being led down the gender transitioning path.
Strangely enough, just this morning, before releasing this article on Substack, I received this video from an American group I follow. I’ll leave you with it.
Nice summary Phil - you’ve pulled out some really interesting points.