The Fix Is In. Again. (Again).

Some extra bits on the WHO's transgender consultation panel and one of its members, Florence Ashley.

Thank you to Glinner for publishing my first post, on the WHO’s trans consultation and the activities of one of their advisors, Florence Ashley. Here are some other bits and pieces that didn’t make the cut in my piece about WHO’s ‘guideline development group’ and in particular their committee member Florence Ashley.

There’s much to be said about the composition of this TRAStar Chamber. @justdad7 on Twitter has done a very informative thread pointing out this group’s homogeneity of thought and opinion, how critical voices are entirely absent and also that there appear to be significant conflicts of interest.

Julia Mason MS MD has pointed out this group has a fair number of individuals with particular axes to grind and that the WHO has set a comment window from 18 December 2023 to 7 January 2024, when of course most people will have their minds on other things. She summarises this strategy with 

"It feels to me like activists (who inexplicably have control) at WHO are rushing to get their view written down as ‘the way to do it’ before more countries take a look at the evidence and find it lacking."

There is much to be said about most of those involved in this project, and whatever merit is added by the inclusion of members who work in the field of HIV/AIDS education, management and healthcare, there is colossal overrepresentation of ‘experts’ from WPATH, Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE) and other groups hell bent on affirming cross-sex identification in children and the introduction gender self-ID. Women’s groups and detransitioners don’t even get a look in.

Transing Kids

Florence is another man who advocates for gender identity ideology and the blind affirmation of fashionable identities above the material reality of our sexed bodies. He wrote a book “Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis”, which earned the merit of a forward by the woman-ignoring gender identity ideologue Victor Madrigal-Borloz. The Harvard Law Review’s take on Ashley’s book is worthy of critique all by itself, but it’s Ashley himself we are interested in.

Most of his ‘academic’ output is the same old nasty garbage arguing for the unquestioning transition of children and against sex by deception law. He cares not for the consequences on others, only for himself, and reading his published output is like intimately exploring a large bowl of fetid maggots.

Taking as an example “Thinking an ethics of gender exploration: Against delaying transition for transgender and gender creative youth” which was published in 2019 by Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the title alone tells you the author should be nowhere near child psychology, and because birds of a feather flock together he uncritically references the quackiest quacks out there - Diane Ehrensaft and Jack Turban.

This particular paper of Ashley’s embodies his narcissistic rage at an earlier paper by Bernadette Wren (of Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust) “Ethical issues arising in the provision of medical interventions for gender diverse children and adolescents” again published by Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. There’s plenty of things to criticise Wren about in her running of the Tavistock and Portman Gender Identity Service, and she is undoubtedly compromised by her own role in the transition of a number of young people.

Ashley’s motivation is transparent: he mentions ‘gender euphoria’ six time, as oppositional to ‘gender dysphoria’, and we all know what it is he is talking about. As usual, this is projected onto gender-nonconforming children with whom he shares nothing in common:

“Unfortunately, Wren mistakenly takes the need for more curiosity and exploration as warranting further delaying of transition, generating a tension between the perhaps unwarranted need for caution and the undesirability of clinicians who, paralysed by uncertainty, endlessly defer transition”

“Interventions such as social transition, puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy should not be unduly delayed solely on account of fear of uncertainty and a vague risk of distress. Gender creative youth’s actual distress is very real, and future uncertainty is an inescapable reality of gender: it is not a bug, it is a feature.”

“A common fear is that social transitioning and puberty blockers will make children more likely to grow up trans; that may be true, but why would that be a bad thing unless we believe that it is bad to be trans? Clinicians should ask questions like these and invite the input of trans communities as holders of privileged knowledge about transitude.”

“...unbounded social transition and ready access to puberty blockers ought to be seen as the default, and it is deviations from them that warrant justification. The mere fact that transitioning might influence gender identities is not an a priori reason to delay transition, since identities are just as susceptible of being foreclosed by delaying transition than by allowing it.”

He is so zealously wedded to his take on gender identity ideology he makes statements such as

“(p)ractitioners and parents must be attentive to potential overcorrection, as parental affirmations of their child’s gender can lead to a perception in the child that they will only be accepted if they continue to be transgender, to identify with that specific gender or to express it in a specific way, which notably risks hampering the natural development of some youth’s non-binary identities and non-conforming gender expressions”

merrily putting children into boxes, rather than letting them be themselves.

Florence on Florence

In case anyone out there still thinks Ashley’s views on this have any sincerity, credibility or coherence, I would like to finish with some of his own words, the cynical words of a man who advocates for the blind affirmation of transgender identity in adolescents and young children, and thinks that sex by deception is acceptable. 

From “Genderfucking non-disclosure: Sexual fraud, transgender bodies, and messy identities”, Dalhouse Law Journal, 2018:

“Even after years thinking about gender identity in both scholarly and lay contexts, my own gender identity remains largely unintelligible.”

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