It pays to hold your nerve when the rest of the culture is losing theirs. Not just for your own sake. But for the sake of those who risk becoming a byword for the (hopefully) brief period of madness that overlook a declining Western culture at the start of the 21st century.

It pays to hold your nerve.

Always.

With the latest news out of the UK that a young woman is calling out the National Health Service’s gender clinic for not challenging her strongly enough when she was 16, and wanting to transition to male, it feels like the ground is shifting back to sanity.

And if you’ve been holding your nerve and saying “Wait a minute, some of what we are doing in the name of the Sexular Age is deeply dangerous, and trumps ideology over science,” then maybe you might actually be on the right side of history. Fancy that!

So a young woman, Keira Bell, who went through a regime of puberty blockers and then surgery to remove her breasts, says that she “should have been challenged over my transition”.  

Clearly she wasn’t. And clearly a judge thinks there is a case for the NHS and Tavistock to answer, as a full hearing has been given the go-ahead.

The centre is, of course, denying any fault, and is purporting to have made strong scientific-based decisions, rather than ideological ones. And for a while it seemed like the whole world was going along with this.

We stood watching, mouths agape, as seemingly every political and judicial leader in the West rushed headlong towards championing gender transition for young people experiencing gender dysphoria.

And all this despite the lack of long term studies of the effects of the drugs involved; despite the sense that social contagion is at least part of what is spiking the numbers; despite the knowledge that many gender-confused young people grow out of their confusion over time; despite the fact that many same-sex-attracted young people are being told they are transgender, when clearly they’re simply same-sex-attracted.

And that’s leaving aside the whole matter of women’s rights, and what it even means to be a woman in the world any longer, given that that term is going to mean exactly nothing if a man can become a woman because he feels he is one.

Though it’s hard to convince those who have serious skin in the game. As the BBC reports:

Gender identity charity Mermaids said that people face a long wait for access to such services, that they can save lives and that very few people regret their decision.

Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? Let’s put that to the test in a scientific setting in which the organisation controlling the date and testing the sample isn’t named after a fictitious underwater character. Meanwhile there are parents concerned about their child’s move in this direction accusing Mermaids of undermining them and virtually escorting children to the clinic, sitting outside, guarding them against any parental involvement.

To her credit, clinical psychologist at Tavistock, Dr Polly Carmichael, admitted to the BCC that things were complex:

“This is a heated debate at the moment. And I think taking a step back – and having an external considered review of the evidence and people’s feelings about the most appropriate way to support young people – can be nothing but beneficial at this point.”

Yet it takes an outcry for that to happen. Is it only because the debate has gotten heated that Tavistock is slowing things down?

And only “beneficial at this point“?  Surely at all points! It sounds like a serious backtrack compared to what has been going on. The cat has been belled! This has always been complex. Yet the speed at which centres like Tavistock have gone about issuing serious drugs to young people that have irreversible side effects, flies in the face of what Dr Carmichael now asserts.

The BBC reports about Keira, who started her transgender self-discovery tour on-line, that:

She was referred to the Tavistock GIDS clinic at the age of age 16. She said after three one-hour-long appointments she was prescribed puberty blockers.

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