UK Politics: Not even a Penny for a new Prime Minister

[DaveSumm]

33 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

I’ve no idea what my insurance is… I passed my test 4 years ago (the Monday before Lockdown 1). My wife added me to hers, and checks the comparison sites every year

I added my wife to mine, she doesn’t even drive and the rate plummeted. Now I just get joined insurance every year purely for the discount.

[BigFatCoward]

3 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Nice. Do you get special plod rates? Also, how many years no claims do you have?

6 years no claims. And I only drive about 4k a year.

You can get police discount some places, but that was just the cheapest without offering any discount. 

Edited April 6 by BigFatCoward

[Spockydog]

 

 

[Heartofice]

BBC must be compromised by ‘vested interests’ 

[Spockydog]

State of this brainless bellend.

 

Edited April 9 by Spockydog

[Zorral]

There are strings of words there, but they contain no meaning. 

[Heartofice]

Hilary Cass: Weak evidence letting down children in gender care

 

The full Cass report is out now detailing the mistreatment of children who were questioning their gender. 
 

Quote

Addressing children and young people in the foreword to her report, she wrote: "I have been disappointed by the lack of evidence on the long-term impact of taking hormones from an early age; research has let us all down, most importantly you."

"The reality is we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress."

 

 

 

[BigFatCoward]

Tesco, The UK's biggest supermarket chain said pre-tax profits hit £2.3bn, up from £882m, while sales rose by 4.4% to £68.2bn in the year to 24 February.

it was never inflation, it was blatant and disgraceful profiteering. 

[Which Tyler]

But... that profiteering CREATED inflation

[TrackerNeil]

13 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Hilary Cass: Weak evidence letting down children in gender care

 

The full Cass report is out now detailing the mistreatment of children who were questioning their gender. 

I've been following this from across the pond, and I am eager to read this report. (I haven't yet.) What I have heard in the commentary was that Cass was pretty direct in her opinion that the GIDS clinicians were moving way too fast and on too little evidence.

Hannah Barnes, a BBC reporter, wrote Time to Think on this very topic, and she's a good source for news on these issues. I am keeping my ears open for her take.

[Fragile Bird]

16 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Tesco, The UK's biggest supermarket chain said pre-tax profits hit £2.3bn, up from £882m, while sales rose by 4.4% to £68.2bn in the year to 24 February.

it was never inflation, it was blatant and disgraceful profiteering. 

Exactly the case with the big grocery chains in Canada.

[The Anti-Targ]

The thing with gathering evidence on long term effects of gender hormone treatment on children and young teens is it's hard to get evidence without treating children and young teens. Without reading the report I can certainly imagine that there has been no or little long term academic follow up with young people who have received gender hormone therapy, and if that is a significant failing then that needs to be fixed, and applied retrospectively to carry out follow ups with people who received therapies over the last 5+ years.

[karaddin]

Just now, The Anti-Targ said:

The thing with gathering evidence on long term effects of gender hormone treatment on children and young teens is it's hard to get evidence without treating children and young teens. Without reading the report I can certainly imagine that there has been no or little long term academic follow up with young people who have received gender hormone therapy, and if that is a significant failing then that needs to be fixed, and applied retrospectively to carry out follow ups with people who received therapies over the last 5+ years.

I read a guardian piece discussing it and I think this is the primary criticism, but as you said it's not as straightforward and simply insisting we can't treat people until those studies exist.

It did have a comment about puberty blockers not being demonstrated to improve psychological health in the one or two studies of those that it accepted as of sufficient quality but that's fundamentally missing the point - their purpose isn't to make things better but to prevent things getting worse, and a finding of unchanged would indicate to me that they're doing their job. There was some other discussion of the value of puberty blockers for trans boys given a later hormone induced testosterone puberty will override the first estrogen based puberty which I think is a reasonable question to ask but that the choice is ultimately up to the person in question. 

It conceded that it is preventing irreversible changes in trans girls but that it also needs to be balanced against damage to fertility - again a reasonable concern to raise but once again the individual is the only person that can actually make that decision, and undergoing puberty you don't want isn't the "neutral" outcome. 

There was another comment on puberty blockers with the conclusion not following from the prior statement at all to the point that I wondered if it was a misquote by the guardian: 

Quote

Data from gender clinics reported in the Cass review showed the vast majority of people who started puberty suppression went on to have masculinising or feminising hormones, suggesting that puberty blockers did not buy people time to think.

Unless the argument is "puberty blockers are an unnecessary delay and we should proceed to actual hormone treatment" that just doesn't follow at all. 

On the whole I suspect a whole lot of people are going to trumpet the headline that this review is essentially debunking trans health care when that isn't what it's saying. My biggest reservation after what I read is that it's not really understanding quite how severe the cost of inaction can be which really hampers waiting for additional research.

[The Anti-Targ]

Indeed, before you can assess the merits of any therapy you have to define the outcomes you are wanting to achieve. Improving mental health is completely different to stabilising mental health which is different again to slowing the deterioration of mental health. Depending on the situation any of those outcomes can be what is intended.

Puberty blockers are clearly a stop gap measure meant to give the person time to figure out what and who they want to be. If you are expecting a person's mental health to improve while they continue to experience doubt and uncertainty about their identity then your expectations are unrealistic. Similarly if you are expecting a person's mental health not to deteriorate when they have fully formed their gender identity and it is not the one their body presents as and the only thing they are being offered is puberty blockers then you also have unrealistic expectations.

 

[Heartofice]

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The thing with gathering evidence on long term effects of gender hormone treatment on children and young teens is it's hard to get evidence without treating children and young teens. Without reading the report I can certainly imagine that there has been no or little long term academic follow up with young people who have received gender hormone therapy, and if that is a significant failing then that needs to be fixed, and applied retrospectively to carry out follow ups with people who received therapies over the last 5+ years.

Well, the main criticism of the report is that treatment was rolled out at scale to children with very little robust science behind it. That’s more than a failing, it’s a huge medical scandal. Especially given the life altering nature of these treatments on confused and vulnerable children. 
 

On top of that, gender clinics were not keeping data on follow up patients, and if they did they refused to give investigators access to it. 
 

3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Puberty blockers are clearly a stop gap measure meant to give the person time to figure out what and who they want to be.

That is the claim yes. The problem is as posted above, in reality they are just a stop gap measure on a pathway to full hormone therapy.

This might not seem to be an issue to someone if they are working from the assumption that most children claiming to have gender confusion are quite literally ‘trans kids’ and that for most the appropriate action is to affirm and help them by giving them full gender reassignment treatments. 
 

However, the overwhelming majority children grow out of this confusion and so that treatment would simply be inappropriate. Another criticism in the report is that children were not given a holistic examination.
There was little work trying to understand what other mental health issues and causes might be going on at the same time in relation. So rather than trying to understand how trauma or autism might be playing in to a child’s behaviour, they were just affirmed, and put into an irreversible pathway. 
 

Puberty blockers might be an appropriate treatment for some, but it’s almost certainly a much smaller percentage of children than the one Cass is criticising. The report details how actions were taken irresponsibly and quite often due to external pressures. 

Edited April 11 by Heartofice

[Heartofice]

10 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

Hannah Barnes, a BBC reporter, wrote Time to Think on this very topic, and she's a good source for news on these issues. I am keeping my ears open for her take.

Yes she has been instrumental in helping to expose a lot of these practices and giving whistleblowers, who had been scared to speak about it, a way to speak up. 
 

She was on the news yesterday I saw, and her basic message was ‘where have you been?’, in reference to the BBC and other media outlets who have spent the past few years ignoring this scandal, and those who have been shouting down anyone saying the exact same things that the Cass report has exposed.

Its also notable that prominent figures like Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper have all come out in support of the report, which is a big about turn from Labours position only a couple of years ago.

Even Stonewall and Mermaids, two of the biggest supporters of the very treatments that Cass is criticising have come out with ‘yes we agreed with this all along’ statements which would be funny if it wasn’t so grim. 

[Which Tyler]

On 4/10/2024 at 7:58 AM, BigFatCoward said:

Tesco, The UK's biggest supermarket chain said pre-tax profits hit £2.3bn, up from £882m, while sales rose by 4.4% to £68.2bn in the year to 24 February.

it was never inflation, it was blatant and disgraceful profiteering. 

Anyone got any figures for food bank use in the same time?

Closest I've got is 2022-23 (37% increase) which does coincide with the war in Ukraine

[mormont]

One of the ironies of the Cass review is that a major theme is the 'toxicity' of the debate. And yet it has immediately been seized on by the most toxic side of that debate, with the aim of ramping up the toxicity even further.

Little has been said about the review's findings that support for young gender questioning kids is hopelessly underfunded, for example, and that the waiting lists are far too long, and that more - not fewer - gender identity specialist clinics are needed. As is so often the case, people are much more concerned with what those in need of care shouldn't get than what they should.

The review of the effectiveness of puberty blockers is open to criticism, but in any case these are so rarely prescribed that to treat it as the most important issue the review was concerned with shows a deeply skewed set of priorities. The conclusions on social transitioning are... odd. People have been socially transitioning for as long as there have been people. To say we don't know enough about the long term harms and benefits of this strikes me as mistaking timidity for caution.

But the saddest part is that whatever Cass' protestations, the review will be - is being - wielded as a club by those who want to deny that trans identities are valid. It was set up for political reasons and will be used for political reasons. Trans and gender questioning kids should benefit from a review that calls for more support, a holistic approach and better quality evidence. Does anyone here think they actually will?

[Heartofice]

30 minutes ago, mormont said:

One of the ironies of the Cass review is that a major theme is the 'toxicity' of the debate. And yet it has immediately been seized on by the most toxic side of that debate, with the aim of ramping up the toxicity even further.

Who is this toxic side? Is it the side of people who have been warning about this for years? Or is the side who have been defending these practices and who continue to be blind to the issues?

31 minutes ago, mormont said:

Little has been said about the review's findings that support for young gender questioning kids is hopelessly underfunded, for example, and that the waiting lists are far too long, and that more - not fewer - gender identity specialist clinics are needed.

Well firstly, maybe the reason it isn't being talked about quite so much is because the most important finding, and the bulk of the recommendations by the Cass review centre on the past poor practices and mistreatment of vulnerable young people. I understand why you wouldn't want to acknowledge that and are much more comfortable moving the focus to an area that isn't damning to your position.

Secondly, one of the reasons that there is a need for so many gender specialist clinics is due to the exponential rise in the number of children being referred. It is unsurprising that services have been unable to cope with such a rapid change, and more investigation should be made into the factors behind this increase if you want to truly understand it.

37 minutes ago, mormont said:

As is so often the case, people are much more concerned with what those in need of care shouldn't get than what they should.

There should be a concern that children are getting the right treatment and not being mistreated. I'm not sure what is hard to understand about it.

37 minutes ago, mormont said:

The review of the effectiveness of puberty blockers is open to criticism, but in any case these are so rarely prescribed that to treat it as the most important issue the review was concerned with shows a deeply skewed set of priorities.

Let's just ignore mistreatment of children, it's just a small number, don't even talk about it. Move onto something more important like Tesco prices.
 

39 minutes ago, mormont said:

But the saddest part is that whatever Cass' protestations, the review will be - is being - wielded as a club by those who want to deny that trans identities are valid. It was set up for political reasons and will be used for political reasons. Trans and gender questioning kids should benefit from a review that calls for more support, a holistic approach and better quality evidence. Does anyone here think they actually will?

Some humility here would go a long way. On this topic, you and others have continuously mischaracterised the other side of the debate, misrepresented what people are saying and not listened. This is an opportunity to actually listen. 
 

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Little has been said about the review's findings that support for young gender questioning kids is hopelessly underfunded, for example, and that the waiting lists are far too long, and that more - not fewer - gender identity specialist clinics are needed

In a demonstration of what you're talking about, it didn't even warrant a mention in the Guardian piece that I read.