| All Articles |
| Articles By Author |
| Articles By Magazine |
| Articles By Subject |
| Full Text Search |
| Aubane Historical Society |
| The Heresiarch Website |
| Athol Books Online Sales |
| Athol Books Home Page |
| Archive Of Articles From Church & State |
| Archive Of Editorials From Church & State |
| Archive Of Articles From Irish Political Review |
| Archive Of Editorials From Irish Political Review |
| Belfast Historical & Educational Society |
| Athol Books Secure Online Sales |
| Irish Writer Desmond Fennell |
| The Bevin Society |
| David Morrison's Website |
Subscribe Securely To
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| From: Irish Political Review: Editorials |
| Date: September, 0001 |
| By: Editorial |
Misreporting The Tavistock Scandal. Editorial |
| Misreporting the Tavistock Scandal The decision to decommission a clinic specialising in gender re-alignment, the Tavistock Centre in London, made by the British National Health Service in late July, has exposed a fault-line in the Irish media, centred on the Irish Times and RTÉ. Since the news broke on July 28th, neither outlet has covered the story in accordance with normal journalistic standards. These failings would not occur without an element of political cover. In due course questions arising from Tavistock will need to be raised at the highest level of the Irish political system. Apart from its media and political ramifications, the medical malpractice at the heart of the story has an Irish dimension in that 238 youths from the Republic have been referred to Tavistock through the Health Service Executive (HSE) since 2011. This is a lower proportion of the population than the corresponding figure in the UK, but it is still significant. In the light of the revelations and the decommissioning of the clinic, it would be interesting to hear justifications from the Health Services Executive for its support for Tavistock. In any case this matter will now almost certainly end up in the Irish law courts. A medical negligence case against Tavistock currently in preparation in Britain reportedly has a large number of families already joined to it (Tavistock gender clinic ‘to be sued by 1,000 families, The Times, 11 August 2022). The Tavistock scandal was briefly described in an Editorial, “Irish Media: Culture Warâ€, in the August Irish Political Review in the context of an accumulation of biases and problems in the Irish media (excessive cohesion or agreement on basic issues across the different outlets, pro-NATO propaganda, the demonisation of Sinn Fein, excessive influence of the LGBT lobby etc), together with a notable absence of awareness within the media of these defects. But the specific question of the treatment of “transgender distress†in young people at the Tavistock Centre and how the subject is being reported on in Ireland, requires separate treatment. In seeking to explain what has gone on in the Irish media and by way of providing necessary context, it is necessary to refer back to the Arms Trial of 1970. In the fall-out from that event, the Irish Establishment shifted away from the Republican ideology which had been its anchor up to that point. The forging of a new identity for the Irish State took many years and has never really succeeded, but one of its outcomes was a new orientation within the media. The leading organs of the new dispensation have been RTÉ and the Irish Times. A valid question now is: under the old pre-Arms Trial order, would the national broadcasting station and a leading newspaper have been so easily captured by a US-based revolutionary ideology that advocates for the politicisation of medical treatment for young people? Irish Times Response A key paragraph in an Irish Times report by Mark Hilliard when news of the decommissioning of Tavistock was announced, reads: “Efforts continue to identify alternative gender identity clinics abroad, while the HSE has also been developing its own domestic service†(IT, 28 July). Much of Hilliard’s report is concerned with providing the bare facts, but the implication of the above paragraph is that the paramount issue is the provision of a needed service; if Tavistock can no longer provide it, then the HSE must source it elsewhere. That the service provided by Tavistock caused harm to young people and arises from bad science and ideological intimidation is neatly side-stepped. Another Irish Times journalist, Colm Keena, covered the issue in two articles in March. In the first he provided a well-researched account of the controversy surrounding Tavistock and, using the Freedom of Information legislation, gave details on how the Irish authorities were discussing what, if any, changes needed to be made to their policies in the light of the controversy. We quote the following long extract from Keena’s article to show what a piece of informative journalism on this subject looks like. In the early part of the article the details of a case taken by two women in September 2021 in the London High Court against the Tavistock Centre are given. The two women won their case. "Tavistock has been the subject of sustained controversy over recent times, with a former governor of the clinic, Dr David Bell, saying in January that colleagues had approached him in 2018 with concerns that "very disturbed children" were being inappropriately "pushed through" to transition gender. In a November 26th, 2020, email to Dr Philip Crowley, national director of the HSE's Quality Improvement Division, Paul Oslizlok, a consultant at Crumlin, said "confidence in the unit in Tavistock has been somewhat undermined by recent negative publicity". In a briefing paper to the HSE submitted in October 2020, Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), which runs Crumlin hospital, said there was “less than 20 active patients†attending its gender endocrinology service and that the waiting list for children and adolescents with gender identity issues was “significantâ€. The case against Tavistock was taken by two women who did not argue that treatment with puberty blockers was never appropriate, but did argue that it was not possible for those under 18 to give informed legal consent. One of the women, Quincy (Keira) Bell (24), was a natal female who transitioned to a male. She began taking puberty blockers at the age of 15, and subsequently underwent surgery. She now self-describes as female. The second claimant, who was not identified, was the mother of a 15-year-old girl with autism who was concerned that her daughter might be referred to Tavistock and be prescribed puberty blockers. The court did not rule on whether administering children and adolescents with puberty blockers was beneficial or otherwise, but rather whether such patients were in a position to give informed consent. “The approach of the defendant [Tavistock] appears to have been to work on the assumption that if they give enough information and discuss it sufficiently often with the children, they will be able to achieve Gillick competency [the legal test for consent],†said the judges. “We do not think that this assumption is correct.†The court ruled that for patients who had not reached their 16th birthday, court approval would be required before the treatment could be administered. Referrals to Tavistock in the UK had gone from 97 children and young people in 2009, to 2,519 by 2018, the court was told. The gender split, which had been 50/50 in 2011, was 76 per cent natal female by 2019. The court was told there was evidence that the number of young people with gender dysphoria who had autistic spectrum disorder was higher than was the case for the population generally. In the October 2020 briefing paper prepared for the HSE, CHI said “gender identity issues may exist in isolation or as a manifestation of a more complex underlying psychological or psychiatric illnessâ€. It noted that the endocrinologist at Crumlin who had a special interest in transgender services had resigned in September 2020 and that a “significant reason†for the resignation was the failure to establish a multidisciplinary team and agree a model of care. “The decision to embark on a medical transition journey for young people without comprehensive specialist multidisciplinary psychosocial team assessment and support can lead to catastrophic outcomes,†the report noted" (IT, 10 March). Keena’s second article on this subject, published a week later, has a very different slant. Summarising the contents of the Interim Report of the Cass Review (a Review initiated after the court case and headed by Dr Hilary Cass, a consultant in paediatrics) into Tavistock, it had a main heading of, ‘Adversarial’ adult trans debate is hindering teenagers, report finds following by a sub-heading which reads: Controversy is making it harder to develop care model for teens with gender dysphoria. These headings distort the message of the Interim Report. What it says, a message repeated in the text of Keena’s article, is that “professionals have adopted different clinical approaches depending on their views on the cause of gender dysphoria in children and young peopleâ€. That message is very different to the message of the headings: and the headings fit neatly with arguments made by Una Mulally and Jennifer O’Connell that the debate/controversy over transgender issues should not be imported from the UK or the US—effectively that it should be closed down. What happened between the two articles? After Mark Hilliard’s article, four further articles on Tavistock were published by the Irish Times during the first half of August. Two articles, by Jack Power and Vivienne Clarke respectively, both saying much the same thing, were published on 9th August in response to a news item carried on that morning’s edition of Morning Ireland (see RTÉ Response below for more on that). The main news point was that the HSE was continuing to refer young people to Tavistock, despite the decision to decommission it. The focus of both articles was on the welfare of Irish trans young people in the context of the HSE decision and the London clinic’s impending closure. In neither article was there any hint that, in the circumstances, the HSE decision was most strange. The next article had the title, “Exploring issues behind the desire to transition is not transphobia, it’s common sense†(13 August) and was by Breda O’Brien, a lone defender of Catholic values on the team of opinion writers at the paper. By simply summarising the findings of the Cass Review, O’Brien demonstrated that the approach used at the Tavistock Clinic was unethical and harmful. Her conclusion was “it is astonishing that the HSE is so sanguine about continuing to use the Tavistock serviceâ€. If the Column was to be faulted, it might be for not delving into the role of transgender ideology in causing normal medical standards to be bypassed. As a columnist known for her Catholic viewpoint, it is unlikely that O’Brien’s articles are widely read by the liberal readership of the IT and, when they are read, it is unlikely they are taken seriously. A possible way that her Column on Tavistock might have received attention was by being referenced in the paper’s Letters Page. Notably and surprisingly no letters were published on the topic. Breda O’Brien’s Column had the function of giving the paper’s coverage the appearance of balance. The last of the four articles was made necessary by what was an inconvenient development from the IT’s viewpoint. Four senior consultants, two psychiatrists and two endocrinologists, all involved in the treatment of young people experiencing gender dysphoria, signed a letter requesting a meeting with the Minister for Health. They wanted to know why the HSE was continuing to use the Tavistock Clinic in the light of the severe criticism of that institution contained in the Cass Review. The article, which was written by the paper’s Health Editor, Paul Cullen, quoted from the letter and repeated the defects identified in the Review: pressure on clinicians to adopt an “unquestioning affirmative approachâ€, and use of puberty blockers when “significant knowledge gaps†existed as to their long-term effects. Consistent with his paper’s previous reporting, however, Cullen was sympathetic to the Tavistock’s gender service as can be seen in the following paragraph: “Puberty blockers can help delay potentially unwanted physical changes if a teenager is transgender. Tavistock advises that gender-affirming hormones, such as oestrogen or testosterone, can be prescribed to a trans teenager from the age of 16†(14 August). The assumption behind that paragraph is in line with the contention of transgender ideology that a person’s gender, regardless of their age, is whatever they identify as. Having referred to an “unquestioning affirmative approach†as a defect identified in the Cass Review, Paul Cullen is himself taking such an approach! As was described in last month’s Irish Political Review (Irish Media: Culture War), articles by Una Mulally and Jennifer O’Connell published by the IT in July made the case against public debate of the transgender issue on the grounds that it would be “importing phoney discoursesâ€. One such discourse was almost certainly the debate in Britain about the services provided at Tavistock. As the Cass Review shows there is nothing phoney about that discourse. In the way it has covered the Tavistock story, the IT has been defensive of transgender ideology along the lines set out by Mulally and O’Connell. (We should point out that that the problematic area of transgender ideology is the application of irreversible treatments prior to adulthood. Mature individuals who decide they wish to transition to the opposite gender in full knowledge of what they are undertaking constitutes a completely separate issue.) Irish Times readers have yet to be informed of the fundamental nature of the malpractice that is now being brought to an end in Britain. Since the news broke that the Tavistock is to be closed, the paper has failed to report the significant implications of the story. The RTÉ Response The IT’s misreporting of the Tavistock story has been subtle. The same cannot be said of that of RTÉ. Twelve days after the story broke (9 August), it was covered on Morning Ireland. A reporter, Aisling Kenny, gave a full report; and then Dr Siobhán Nà Bhriain, the relevant manager at the HSE, was interviewed by Rachel English. While too much emphasis was given to the lack of services for trans teenagers, the basic facts were presented and the concerns of a Dublin psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Horan, about the standard of care at Tavistock were reported. A problem only emerged when it came to the interview with Dr. Nà Bhriain which was described as follows in an item on the RTÉ news website: "National Clinical Director for Integrated Care within the HSE Dr Siobhán Ni Bhriain said: "The service has not been deemed not safe, because if it was deemed completely unsafe it would have closed immediately, that's the first thing." The second thing is the Tavistcok will keep open for another year or so until the regional units are developed in the UK and increased numbers of people with the skills to deliver care to these children. "So, we will continue to refer while Tavistock is still open, we will monitor extremely closely and we have for quite a number of years been exploring other options." The obvious question, why is the HSE continuing to use Tavistock following the revelations of the Cass Review, was not asked. It is most unlikely that the omission was caused by an oversight on the part of the journalists. The key question was not asked because RTÉ, like the IT, is sympathetic to transgender ideology as a matter of policy. Fortunately, neither RTÉ nor the IT, nor indeed the HSE, were allowed get away with this distortion. Two days after the broadcast, as referred to above, four senior doctors working in the field sent a letter to the Minister for Health requesting a meeting and demanding an explanation why the arrangement with Tavistock was not being discontinued. Further evidence of RTÉ’s inability to fairly cover the story came on the Brendan O’Connor Show on RTÉ Radio 1 over two Sundays (those of 7th and 14th August), when Dearbhail McDonald was standing in for O’Connor. The format of the show on Sundays is that the first hour is devoted to a panel discussion of the news stories of the day. On both Sundays McDonald began by summarising the stories in the Sunday papers and on each occasion she referred to stories about Tavistock. The panel discussion is sometimes dismissed as an outlet for the chattering classes but, at times, especially when the late broadcaster, Marian Finucane, ran it, it can be insightful; things get blurted out in the discussions that would not be said on serious news programmes. Arguably, the newspaper panel discussion provided an apposite forum for discussing a hot topic like Tavistock. In the event, pusillanimity ruled and the topic was ignored. The cop-out makes sense when RTÉ’s bias on the transgender subject is borne in mind. But a more blatant example of straightforward propaganda was to be found in the programme following the Brendan O’Connor Show on August 14th. The This Week programme is devoted to serious news and receives considerable advance promotion. Instead of covering Tavistock, which was a topic in a number of newspapers at the time, an item was broadcast on a trans woman affected by a decision of the English Rugby Football Union (RFU). The sports body had decided to prevent transgender women from playing contact rugby and its action was quickly followed by a similar decision by the corresponding body in Ireland, the IRFU. The transgender woman, Alix Fitzgerald, was quoted as follows on the RTÉ news website: "In an interview with This Week on RTÉ Radio One, she said: "I left Ireland quite a long time ago, before it became the country it is now. "When Ireland changed—and it has changed hugely in my lifetime—I was finally able to connect with the place I am from and say: 'I am Irish, and I belong here’. When the IRFU did that, it damaged my sense of belonging. I feel wounded"…" (14 August). The RFU decision meant that Fitzgerald can no longer play for East London Vixens RFC, which she has played for since 2018. She is one of the seven individuals affected by the decision in England. As the interview proceeded, it transpired that she was 54 years of age. This story was much less important than the Tavistock controversy and provided Fitzgerald with the opportunity to make a political point, rather than investigating the question of whether transgender women enjoy an unfair advantage in women’s sport. A final question that should be asked of senior management at RTÉ is: why hasn’t the Tavistock story been covered by RTÉ Investigates? Given that the high numbers of young people presenting with gender dysphoria, relative to the historical pattern, is a deep concern for many parents and, given that malpractice has been identified in the way the issue has been handled by Tavistock, the case for an investigation must be very strong. As with the IT, the misreporting by RTÉ of Tavistock shows a powerful media organisation exploiting its position of privilege to “control the narrativeâ€. The Over-Optimism of the LGBT Lobby The Irish LGBT lobby lost the run of itself following its victory in the Same Sex Marriage Referendum of May 2015 and again following the Repeal of the Eight Amendment in May 2018. The activists of those campaigns, a term that embraces a large tranche of people working in the media and the political parties, believed a watershed had been reached in which the country had been freed from the burden of its oppressive, Statist, Catholic, ethno-nationalist past. Even if that was understood as wishful exaggeration, the idea caught on that if you repeat something often enough, it will eventually become true. Unfortunately for the LGBT cause, that’s not the way society works. Two events from recent history suggest that the LGBT analysis of Ireland, from its own perspective, is wildly over-optimistic. The first was Sinn Fein’s experience in the combined European and Local Elections of May 2019, in which the party chased after the imagined LGBT zeitgeist, and experienced a significant drop in electoral support. From a previous total of 159, the party lost 78 Local Council seats, giving it a new total of 81, and it lost two of its three seats in the European Parliament. Assuming that the SF leadership has the capacity to hear what its electoral base is saying, a lesson will have been learned from that electoral drubbing that the party should dial down its LGBT rhetoric. The second event was the controversy over Katherine Zappone’s appointment to the United Nations as Irish Special Envoy on Human Rights during the Summer of 2021. When Zappone was forced to resign from this new role, the spin was that the appointment had not been made in accordance with proper procedures and that her attendance at a social function in the Merrion Hotel had been problematic through being a breach of Covid guidelines. Actually, the idea that Ireland would be represented at the UN by a strongly ideological lesbian feminist, a US native who currently resides in New York, was a bridge too far the Irish electorate. When news of the appointment came out, a clear message against it was conveyed up the chain of command through constituency channels. The LGBT and feminist movements both originate in North America and both bear the puritanical mark of their place of origin. They have strong associations with the State of California, a locale where common sense is sometimes conspicuously absent. Their leading ideologues decry the inheritances of history and insist on a revolutionary break with the sexual norms of the past. But why? In Ireland and elsewhere the rights of women, gays, transexuals and the other “identities†have been recognised; their inclusion in society is no longer impeded by discriminatory legislation. Nor has the weight of history placed obstacles in the path of such reforms, quite the contrary, the concept of equality is prized in the seminal documents of the Irish Republican tradition; the social consensus in Ireland is that people should be treated decently regardless of their gender, orientation, ethnicity etc. In present circumstances, pertinent questions for RTÉ and the Irish Times might be: why are you encouraging the over-optimism of the LGBT lobby, and why are you championing revolutionary ideologies from across the Atlantic—ideologies that, for no good reason, exert a polarising influence on society? ‘TERF Island’ The acronym TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Writing in September 2021 in a journal with a reputation for being America’s most influential journal of religion and public life, First Things, Mary Harrington explains how the animosity felt towards them by the “Identitarian Left†is such that ostracism, loss of employment and online harassment are all deemed appropriate punishments for TERFs. In the course of reviewing two gender critical books by British authors—Material Girls, Why Reality Matters for Feminism by Kathleen Stock, and Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce—Harrington demonstrates how developments in the UK have so infuriated pro-trans activists in the US and Canada that they now refer to Britain as ‘TERF Island’. She identifies a UK-based parenting forum, Mumsnet, as the centre of a resistance movement against transgender ideology, and claims it draws support from both Left and Right. She states: "Aided by women from Britain’s well-developed trade union tradition, who brought organisational skills to the table, grassroots opposition on Mumsnet has coalesced into gender-critical activist bodies. Notable and high-profile groups formed in recent years include Sex Matters, Fair Play for Women, Woman’s Place, the LGB Alliance, and Transgender Trend. Today this coalition coordinates to lean on every available lever of power, including political lobbying, lawfare, and the creation of “best practice†legal and policy templates for organisations to use" (The Gender Resistance, First Things, 14 September 2021). On the Transgender Trend website we have seen impressive work by a feminist philosopher from a Quaker background, Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans. An article by her in the Medical Law Review, an authoritative journal published by Oxford University Press, has the title, “The Medical-Legal Making of The Transgender Child†in which she shows how law has been used to facilitate the practices that have caused the Tavistock Clinic to be decommissioned. A weak link she identifies is the most apolitical section of the Legal Establishment: the human rights lobby. In another article she argues that the trans child is “a figure shaped and reshaped by post-modern theory and trans politics†(see Judith Butler at the Court of Appeal, Transgender Trend website), and she characterises Judith Butler, an American philosopher based at the University of Berkley in California as the High Priestess of transgender ideology. In this country at present transgender identity has become a social contagion. With the exception of a group of medics, the response has been to meekly transfer vulnerable young people to the care of a British institution compromised by an odious ideology. In that sense Ireland owes a debt to a movement in English civil society that has provided the force behind efforts to close down the Tavistock Clinic. For many decades the Irish Times and RTÉ have waged an intellectual war on all aspects of Irish national culture. This they call thought leadership. But what is the destination toward which revisionist thought leadership is pushing us? Under the rainbow banner of the LGBT and feminist lobbies, a rich national heritage is to be jettisoned and in its stead we have already begun to sink to the status of a provincial backwater of California. Sticking with our national heritage, while acknowledging its defects as well as its glories, is a better option. |