Let's meet a 'Gender Identity Specialist'

Every time Pink News or The Guardian mention ‘experts’ (or in this case ‘specialists’) especially when it comes to ’gender’, a field in which many claim expertise, or specialism, but never quite enough expertise or specialism to offer a coherent definition of the word ‘gender’, I immediately ask friends to check and see what level of kooks we’re talking about. Well, this story presents us with a doozy.

Meet Doctor Aidan Kelly. See how much of this you can bear. Here’s the robust thought process behind the scenes at GIDS.

In case your mind may have wandered from what Aidan is saying—which is understandable as he seems to specialise in using the most amount of words possible to convey nothing—I’ve reproduced excerpts from his speech here.

Like Susie Green’s Ted Talk, he’s giving away much, much more than he means to.

“…and developing bodies and developing minds and maturity... and so we do things…erm… in a very kind of, quite cautious… people get annoyed with us because we move too slowly... erm but I guess given it’s er young people, we, we think it's appropriate that we move slowly. Erm it's not just a physical intervention service, although that's part of what we offer with an endocrine team and actually Irish people... we do have the endocrine, the endocrinologist, the hormone doctors are are in, are in Crumlin. So erm, they used to be they had to travel across to London to to UCLH to get the endocrinology there, but actually, that's er that's that’s changed, we've been able to support the local erm consultants to offer that service instead. We also do psychosocial and therapeutic support… erm… which is a bit more difficult in Ireland because we come less regularly but…erm… that's the idea… erm… it's just in terms of what we offer in terms of erm… the world’s… errrrr… the the world agreed kind of er… criteria or… er um… protocol for Child Services. I should have actually pointed out that the GIDS, the Gender Identity Development service that I work in is the largest child gender service in the world…erm… “

“Erm… we start are in terms of physical interventions, which people, especially young people are really keen to know more about, what what can I get? how can I get it? Erm we start off with something that is physically… erm… reversible okay? So… which is something called the hypothalamic blocker, which basically pauses puberty… er… stops your body producing it's naturally occurring… er… sex hormones, so for assigned males that would be testosterone, assigned females that would be oestrogen… erm… it doesn't further masculinise or feminize your body, it just stops things from progressing any further... erm… that won't be offered until at least… er… you're halfway through puberty... erm… and that, see that, for different people, that's different ages… erm, but that is because… erm… for lots of young people, beginning puberty is a really important thing, and how you integrate your your your your identity, your idea about yourself in terms of not just gender, but sexuality… erm… and other things, it's it’s really important that… er er… a certain amount of… erm puberty is allowed to occur. You're allowed to develop an idea of who you might be attracted to, and also… erm, we know the limited evidence that we do have in this area, erm… which is is a massively under researched, and really, it's quite an experimental area, especially in terms of young people…”

“Erm… the limited evidence that we do have is that people, young people, before coming into puberty, who express gender… er related difficulties, erm… it's not clear whether that will sustain throughout puberty, it’s probably er… the numbers… people argue over the numbers, but it's certainly kind of a 50-50 sort of split in terms of what we expect…erm… there are so many people who will go through puberty and continue on, to kind of, express er, e,r a wish or, or or an identity with a gender with that they weren't assigned at birth…erm… but then there are also the young children who experiment and play and… erm… for them once they hit puberty, so experiment and play with maybe things are stereotypically viewed as the other gender or a different gender. And then once they come to puberty, they find a way in incorporating… erm… that identity within the body that which they inhabit… erm and so it's really… so puberty is pivotal, really, really important. It's a scary thing, but it's also a really important thing too…erm…

“…so once we've gotten to a point where we think this is the right thing to do, erm with the family and really are often we are putting responsibility back on the family because we don't have… er… the evidence base to say it's these kids and not these kids or or or how we can pick out which kids should go forward, and which kids shouldn’t, it's really a holistic piece of work and to make sure that the young person, well as much as they can the young person, but also really the family, and that we're… are thinking about everything that needs to be thinking about, engaging conversations are open and honest about any difficulties or things that have gone on in the past…erm just so that we know that if they come back to us in 10 or 15 years, not if they’ll come back to us, but if they think back themselves in 10 or 15 years, they think back and they go, you know what? I made the right decision for me at that time…erm… and that's really what our kind of holistic assessment is all about… erm…”

“…people, often young people and, and families are coming “Why don't just give me the blocker really quickly? It's totally reversible and and give it to me quickly please because my body is changing, it's distressing me” …erm… the blocker is not a not a benign thing… it's not a… it comes with, with I don't mean financial costs, but it comes with er downsides… erm, especially around energy… er if you're a young person, if the person has mood difficulties, the blocker can can can sometimes make that worse… erm… it also takes away the sex hormones, so that that whole thing I was talking about in terms of being attracted to, developing crushes… er… when all your teens and peers are kind of maybe getting into relationships and developing kind of social connections erm in that sense, that’ll be gone, I mean, well not totally gone but that drive, that kind of er interest in, in whether it's the opposite, or the same sex or whatever, is, is kind of greatly reduced.”

“And we do worry, because we don't have er… long term evidence for this, we do worry what impact that might have on their identity because sexuality is such an important part of your identity, who who you're attracted to… erm that the… so so the hypothyroid blocker is available, dependent on puberty so the youngest you can get, I mean different depending how far into puberty you are, you could in theory get the blocker as young as… I've never given someone who's 10 but probably 11 or 12, you know, so it's really, really quite young, it's it’s very much the exception, it's usually… it's not quite precocious puberty but it's an early puberty… erm… but often we're thinking about 13, 14, 15… erm… and then once you're on the blocker for a minimum of a year, and we would continue meeting, thinking…erm… it's not quite therapy, but it's a therapeutic er… piece of work and therapeutic assessment, cross sex hormones which are definitely not… erm… fully reversible… erm they are available from 16 and up okay? Erm… and there there's there's, once you start taking them, then slowly, it's not an instant thing over time overnight, but slowly they will changes, change will start to happen that even if you stop taking that medication it won’t… you know… it won’t it won’t undo itself, I suppose… erm so it's quite serious thing to be thinking about really. “