Europe is Rising

Italian professionals appeal to the new PM, and Spanish parents petition the EU as “Catalan Tavistock” sees an incredible rise in gender dysphoric girls.

Italy 🇮🇹

In a first for Italy, a professional mental health body has raised the alarm on the use of puberty blockers in children and called for ‘rigorous scientific discussion’ on treating gender dysphoria in young people.

In a letter dated 12th January, The Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) addressed the country’s new prime minister, the conservative Giorigia Meloni. The letter signed by the Society’s president Sarantis Thanopulos expressed ‘great concern’ about medical interventions given to young people claiming gender distress, as ‘the development of sexual identity is still in progress.’

‘Only a minority of children who state that they do not identify with their sex confirm this position in adolescence, after puberty,’ the letter claims. ‘To suspend or prevent (their) psychosexual development pending the maturation of a stable identity definition is contradictory to the fact that this development is a central factor in the definition process,’ it continues.

The SPI addressed a similar statement to the country’s minister for health, Prof. Horace Schillaci. 

Ms Meloni has expressed her position on gender ideology in the past, declaring, ‘Yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology.’ As reported by Australian journalist Bernard Lane, the Italian parents’ group Genitori de Gender have said that the debate in Italy is still very lacking. ‘Even the most important information, such as Sweden’s abandonment of the ‘gender affirmative’ (medical) protocol, finds little or no space in the (Italian) media,’ according to a representative. 

AMANDA petition EU policymakers regarding the rise in ROGD 🇪🇸

Meanwhile, the Spanish association AMANDA, which brings together parents of children experiencing rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), have submitted a petition to the European Parliament calling for an end to all types of medical interventions in children until more research has been done. 

While the petition has been accepted by the European Parliament and has been published on their website, AMANDA are appealing to as many people as possible to sign and support it. The petition can be signed here.

The petition demands that EU countries report the number of cases of young people experiencing ROGD to get a complete picture of the phenomenon. Like the letter from the SPI, it calls for debate based on scientific evidence on the consequences of the treatments currently being offered to young people.

‘Mental health professionals should be permitted to carry out their work without interference, with observation over a period of time,’ the petition states. It also demands that exploratory therapy should be used as the first option for children, ‘so that only adults can undergo a social and medical transition, and even then only on a very exceptional basis in those cases where this is the only option for the well-being of the person and always with assessment by a multidisciplinary team, as already required in other European Union countries such as Sweden and Finland.’

It draws attention to the rapid rise of ROGD across European Union countries, which they claim is due to social contagion, noting that these cases are often seen in neurodiverse young people, such as those with high IQ, autism and ADHD, among others, or those with psychological problems due to issues such as sexual abuse, bullying and racism.

AMANDA are fiercely critical of the prevailing affirmative approach, which does not require prior psychological assessment ‘as the gender self-identification is assumed to be correct, even where there are signs that the teenager/young person has issues that could be affecting their self-identification as ‘trans’…’ This affirmative approach, the petition states, conflicts with the free exercise of parental responsibility by fathers and mothers in the case of minors.

At the time of writing, the petition has over 700 signatories.

Catalonia sees an astronomical rise in girls attending gender clinics 🏴󠁥󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

This comes as feminists in Catalonia have revealed a dramatic increase in the number of preadolescent and adolescent girls presenting at the region’s gender clinic.

Between 2015 and 2021, the number of young women and girls presenting at the Servei Trànsit clinic grew by 5700%. The Servei Trànsit is a unit of the Institut Català de la Salut specialised in gender dysphoria, which opened in Barcelona in 2012. The figure was revealed in a report titled ‘From adult men to adolescent girls‘, based on a study by Feminists de Catalunya. 

According to the report, ‘While in the initial years, the Servei Trànsit was mainly aimed at adult men, in recent years minors and, specifically, preadolescent and adolescent girls are one of the main demographic groups of the population served.’

According to the anthropologist Silvia Carrasco, it was not easy to get the data ‘(Feministas de Catalunya) had to go to mediation, a democratic body that must guarantee access to public information, who agreed with us,’ she told Cronica Libra on 11th January. ‘But even so, they have not provided us with data on treatments by age, sex and year, and we know nothing about private healthcare and paediatrics. That is why we insist that our data is conservative, the reality is much worse.’

On 20th January, it was announced that the Council of Medical Associations of Catalonia had launched a guide for caring for trans minors that recommends prudence and psychological examination of children with gender distress. Feministes de Catalunya claims the guide cites their findings.