US-based trans advocacy lobbyists have no place intervening in UK law

The K Street Washington DC-based Endocrine Society has been granted permission to intervene in the UK court case which the world is watching: Bell v Tavistock.

Keira Bell—a young lesbian woman who was subject to trans-affirmative "healthcare" in her teens, only to desist in her sex change beliefs once puberty ended—applied to the high court for a judicial review of the gender clinic's policies.

The court found that children were incapable of giving informed consent to procedures which irreversibly harmed their fertility, growth, bone, heart, brain and other organ health.

The Tavistock clinic has appealed against the judgement, which effectively brought an end to their pediatric transitioning activities. The court permitted several interested parties to submit written evidence in support of the clinic's appeal, including the hormone lobby group.

The Endocrine Society is a privately-owned lobby group for the pharmaceutical industry based in lobbyist central near the Capitol in Washington, DC. While it refers to itself as a "global community," its advocacy and meetings are US-based.

It claims "Protecting access to care for women and transgender patients" as one of its primary aims. In practice, this means it focusses on ensuring that insurance companies will pay out for the synthetic hormones and puberty blockers administered in the name of "transgender health."

"The Endocrine Society's Clinical Practice Guideline on gender dysphoria/gender incongruence provides the standard of care for supporting transgender individuals. The guideline establishes a methodical, conservative framework for gender- affirming care, including pubertal suppression, hormones and surgery and standardizes terminology to be used by healthcare professionals. These recommendations include evidence that treatment of gender dysphoria/incongruence is medically necessary and should be covered by insurance," it says.

The Endocrine Society's guidelines were co-authored by Dr. Norman Spack, a highly controversial gender ideologue medic. Spack publicly admitted in a TED talk that he gave wrong-sex hormones to the 13-year-old son of one of the founders of UK trans lobby group Mermaids, and encouraged him to undergo penectomy and orchiectomy aged 16. These procedures were then unlawful in both the UK and the USA.

Dr. Joshua Safer was quoted as wrongly claiming, regarding intervening in the Bell case, that puberty blockers are reversible.

"It is important that transgender and gender diverse youth have access to the medical standard of care. Because it is reversible, pubertal suppression is the conservative treatment approach…to avoid physical development that might require surgery to reverse later."

Of course, since the Bell judgment, more of us are aware that there is nothing "conservative" about stopping a child from experiencing natural puberty and taking wrong sex hormones as a prelude to extreme plastic surgeries.

People's bodies do not "require" the removal of health body parts, nor do they "require" re-sculpting to resemble the opposite sex.

On the contrary, such "cures," once reserved for adult, biological males with extreme sexual fetishes for female biology (autogynephiles) were confirmed by the court as "experimental"—that is, lacking any evidence base regarding effectiveness and long-term outcomes.

In their application to intervene in the case, the Endocrine Society claimed that endocrinologists should be responsible for the decision whether or not to halt a child's natural puberty, the child cannot consent. Their concern seems to be that UK doctors working within the NHS will not be entitled to give blockers and wrong sex hormones to children.

While this seems to be the case in the US—where children have been set on the medical pathway by clinicians paid for their parents' insurance, but without their parents knowledge—it is not so under the UK's socialized medical system where the ultimate risk is carried by the taxpayers.

Dr. Michael Laidlaw has criticized the Endocrine Society's guidelines which uncritically cheerlead for pediatric transitioning, saying "In our opinion, physicians need to start examining GAT (gender affirmative therapy) through the objective eye of the scientist-clinician rather than the ideological lens of the social activist. Far more children with gender dysphoria will ultimately be helped by this approach."

One wonders why the court found a US body which operates in a wholly privatized healthcare system in good standing to intervene in a UK case. It cannot represent the interests of UK doctors. At any rate, the ES's written submissions may throw further sunlight on the financial interests behind the exploding teen trans trend.

Keira Bell made headlines worldwide when she asked the court to review the Tavistock clinic's policies around puberty blockers.

A panel of three judges found that children were incapable of giving informed consent to treatments which rendered them infertile and with multiple serious lifelong health problems.

It found, on a review of all of the available evidence, that no follow-up data was gathered on the cohort of children who left puberty with permanent damage to their health and fertility.

The Tavistock & Portman Trust appealed against the decision, but no new evidence can be put before the court on appeal.

Alongside representations made by the clinic itself, three trans lobby organizations were granted permission to intervene: the US-based Endocrine Society, Gendered Intelligence and the Brook sexual health clinic.

However, Stonewall—the largest trans lobby organization in the UK with an annual income of £8,315,995 in 2018-19—was refused permission to intervene. This was the second occasion on which the court declined to hear from the gender identity lobbyists.

For reasons one can but speculate on, the intervening parties—all of which have deep pockets filled by the pharmaceutical industry and rainbow philanthropy—approached the general public with a begging bowl to fund paper submissions by lawyers.

One might speculate that fundraising on Crowdjustice grants their intervention in the Bell case a veneer of grassroots respectability, despite the fact that filling big pharma's coffers is not a known charitable or social justice cause.

The Good Law Project recently raised nearly £150,000 on Crowdjustice for the "trans defense fund" to intervene in the gender clinic's appeal against the court's judgment in Bell v Tavistock.

Crowdjustice has close associations with the Good Law Project, which is directed by trans activist barrister Jolyon Maugham.

On Jan. 29, the Good Law Project, in addition to three more trans lobby groups—including the US Endocrine Society—were granted permission by the court to submit representations on paper in the appeal against the Keira Bell decision.

The trans lobby groups are not, however, entitled to bring fresh evidence as the appeal court was satisfied that all the relevant evidence was reviewed by the high court during the hearing in 2020.

Despite this fact, the Good Law Project continues to fundraise on the basis that the Tavistock clinic's staff and patients were not given a fair hearing.

"The voice of trans young people and the voice of the experts who prescribe puberty blockers should have been before the Divisional Court," they wrote.

The statement is bizarre when one considers that the Tavistock has been roundly admonished for failing to follow-up on outcomes for the children it gave puberty blockers to.

As such, the clinic denied trans-identifying teens a "voice" once they had grown out of puberty, and had time—like Keira Bell—to consider and regret the full impact of pediatric transitioning on their long-term health and fertility.

Bell says that she wishes clinicians had delved more deeply into the complex causes of her distress at her sexed body. She now has to live with the consequences of their hasty diagnosis.

Perhaps it will take a US court judgement to compel the Endocrine Society, and other US trans/pharma lobbyists, to recognize the untenable human cost of their profit-making enterprise.