The banality of Aidan

Dr.Aidan Kelly's presentation on 'gender healthcare' is somehow both dull and frightening

Recently you may have seen that Dr. Aiden Kelly's private gender clinic Gender Plus has been approved by The Care Quality Commission. I recognised Kelly's name and remembered seeing a lecture which I found particularly revealing, but probably not in the way he intended, as the video was made private as soon as people started calling attention to it.

Luckily, the Internet never forgets, and here it is, um, ah, in all its, um, glory. The ideological language (sex is ‘assigned’ at birth), the admissions that this version of ‘healthcare’ is experimental and based on stereotypes, the reckless statements that puberty blockers are reversible, something which is based on nothing except wishful thinking…it’s all here. He even references the Gender Unicorn, the creation of one Eli Erlick, who as well as being credibly accused of sex offences, admitted to sending hormone pills to children across the US.

I have also uploaded the video to Odysee in case Kelly or others from Gender Plus manage to remove it from YouTube.

Some highlights follow.

“We start off with something that is physically, em, reversible, which is something called the hypothalamus blocker. Which basically pauses puberty and stops your body produces (sic) naturally occourring sex hormones. So for assigned males that would be testosterone, assigned females that would be estrogen and it doesn't further masculine or feminize your body. It just stops things from progressing any further and that won't be offered until at least you're halfway through puberty. “

“…and really it's quite an experimental area, especially in terms of young people.”

“And so, once we've gotten to a point where we think this is the right thing to do, and with the family and really, we are often, we are putting responsibility back on the family because we don't have the evidence base to say…how we can pick out which kids should go for and which kids shouldn't.”

“And so in terms of medical side, it's the hypothalamus blocker, which if you stop taking it, your body will just kick back in and continue on and reproduce the naturally occurring sex hormone and your puberty basically just kick back in and finish off if it's not already finished.”

“And people often young people and families are (saying) “Why don't you just give me the blocker really quickly. It's totally reversible and give it to me quickly please because my body is changing. It's distressing me.” And the blocker is not a not a benign thing. It's not. It comes with downsides. Especially around energy….If you're a young person, if the person has mood difficulties, the blocker can sometimes make that worse. And it also takes away the sex hormone so that the whole thing I was talking about in terms of being attracted to developing crushes, when all your teens and peers are kind of maybe getting into relationships and developing kind of social connections and that sense. That will be gone. Well, not totally gone. But that drive that kind of interest in whether it's the opposite or the same sex or whatever, is kind of greatly reduced and we do worry because we don't have long term evidence for this.”

“The youngest you can get I mean…it’s 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 very much the exception. It's usually… it's not quite precocious puberty but it's an early puberty. But often with we're thinking about 13, 14, 15.”

But I guess in terms of what often comes out when I do this sort of talk, the common worries that we get are, you know, are we intervening too young with these young people in their bodies? They're, they're young, they haven't fully formed mentally as well as physically and what about sexuality? How do we know that young person is a bit more about sexuality rather than a gender identity and what happens when there's a traumatic history… I always come back to that in a way and go it's really important that we know about history and trauma and thinking about that, but at the same time, we kind of need to think well here we're here because we're here, and I'm gonna say it doesn't matter how we got we're here it does, but it's also not everything as well.”

“There are often worries about difficult life ahead. what this might mean in terms of physical interventions, it can often mean you're signing up to be a patient for the rest of your life, you know, in a way, you're taking what's essentially a physically healthy body you know, it's not got medical… medically it's a healthy body and you're actually introducing medication and making it dependent on medication. And so it's really quite an ethically it's quite a complicated area. Especially for children.“

“How can they know until they're older? 18 and these sorts of things. And the big concern is fertility. Because once you've blocked periods, you're not producing….And once you go on either extreme of testosterone, I mean, it's different and everyone's individual, but you're certainly not going to be producing your naturally occurring hormone. And however after a period of time, and there will be fertility issues if you ever did decide to come off, I suppose. And we're talking about starting a child down this path and how my 14-year-old can think about “when I want to have kids” or you know, most of them say they don't, but when they get to, I don't know 28, 30, whatever. That might change, or often does actually.”

“We do a screener which is a self-report questionnaire that the person, family and the teacher will fill in, and around 30% of the young people who come to get referred to our clinic report autistic traits in the clinical range…. What's that about?”