Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Empire

At Esquire, "Welcome to Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Empire: The genre's most popular writer is determined to upend how books get made. We visited his mind-blowing headquarters in suburban Utah, where he and dozens of employees are working to restore power to the reader."

Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

This comes highly recommended. 

At Amazon, Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings: Book One of the Stormlight Archive.

Britain's Tavistock Scandal (VIDEO)

Douglas Murray's at the video below.

And at the New York Times (the mainstream, noncontroversial take), "England Overhauls Medical Care for Transgender Youth: The National Health Service is closing England’s sole youth gender clinic, which had been criticized for long wait times and inadequate services."

Also, at Spiked, "How ‘The Blob’ smothered the Tavistock scandal: The civil service is determined to crush any dissent against gender ideology."

And from Kathleen Stock, at UnHerd, "Why the Tavistock had to fall: Its ideological roots were rotten from the start":

For years, the seeds of the Tavistock’s downfall have been hiding in plain sight, as a picture has slowly emerged of its clinicians doling out harmful drugs to gender-confused youth as if they were sweets. At the same time, though, a more subtle clue to the clinic’s endemic dysfunction has been contained in the generic communications that followed each new crisis.

“Thoughtful” is a self-description that crops up repeatedly. In response to critical reporting from Newsnight in 2019, the clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service insisted that it was “a thoughtful and safe service”. When Keira Bell and others took their case to the High Court a year later, arguing that under-16s could not give informed consent to puberty blockers, a GIDS spokesperson replied obstinately that theirs was “a safe and thoughtful service”. And when the Care Quality Commission rated the service as “inadequate”, the Tavistock’s ensuing statement defensively began: “The first thing to say is that GIDS has a long track record of thoughtful and high quality care.”

Alongside this manic insistence on thoughtfulness, there has also been a marked tendency to engage in special pleading about the especially difficult and highly contested cultural position the service occupies. For instance, in response to the damning CQC report, CEO Paul Jenkins replied that GIDS “has found itself in the middle of a cultural and political battleground”. And to the news of the closure last week, a spokesperson commented, with the air of someone sighing heavily: “Over the last couple of years, our staff… have worked tirelessly and under intense scrutiny in a difficult climate.”

Presumably what they really mean by this is that, as is now known, for several years GIDS has been caught between the emotionally blackmailing demands of transactivist organisations such as Mermaids and GIRES, talking constantly about suicide risk and lobbying hard for yet more relaxed attitudes to medicalising children, and the criticisms of those who profoundly object to the notion of a “trans child” in the first place. Former employees such as Susan Evans have reported the historical influence of Mermaids and GIRES on managers at the service, despite their lack of formal medical expertise and the possession of clearly vested interests.

Now, you might think that it is the job of a healthcare provider — and especially one who dispenses medication to children — to try to remove itself from current furores, social trends, and pressure from political activists, and to just get on with providing evidence-based medicine according to whatever gold-standard methodology is available at the time. And you might also think that while being thoughtful is all very well in a medical provider, you don’t exactly want them to emulate Hamlet. But to apply these earthbound medical standards to GIDS is to fail to recognise some of the distinctive and converging influences on the service that have led to the unholy mess we now see.

A crucial yet underappreciated part of the story is the clinic’s strong emphasis on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic approaches to mental health. The founder of the Tavistock, Hugh Crichton-Miller, was explicitly influenced by Freud and Jung. And when Domenico Di Ceglie founded the Gender Identity Service for children in 1989, later commissioned nationally as the only English NHS provider, he too was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic methods.

In a 2018 article describing his process, Di Ceglie quotes a Jungian perspective approvingly: “the psyche speaks in metaphors, in analogies, in images, that’s its primary language, so why talk differently? We must write in a way that evokes the poetic basis of mind… it’s a sensitivity to language.” He goes on to describe some of the metaphors and images he has found useful in trying help young dysphoric patients understand their own experience: the metaphor of being “a stranger in one’s own body”, for instance, or the image of navigating between the binary of sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey. Throughout Di Ceglie’s published writing, there is an emphasis on the co-creation of meaning with young patients in the absence of access to any empirical certainty about who the patient “really” is.

This intellectual focus upon the fluidity and construction of meaning, and upon the power of narrative to create more stable personalities, is also heavily present in the published work of Bernadette Wren, Head of Psychology for 25 years at what insiders tweely call the “Tavi”. By her own description, she was “deeply involved” with the GIDS team for much of that time. Alongside psychoanalysis, she adds post-structuralist philosophy to her formative influences, citing figures such as Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault as important in her thinking.

True to the relativism of these philosophers, in Wren’s intellectual vision there are no objective truths but only a series of subjective narratives. She writes: “If the idea of living in the postmodern era means anything, it is that in all our activity together we are in the business of making meaning.” She continues: “In our time, it is hard to see any knowledge or understanding as ‘mirroring’ nature, or ‘mirroring’ reality.” She concludes: “There is an implication here for our work in gender identity clinics: that we are in the business of helping actively to construct the idea and the understanding of transgender, and for this we should accept responsibility.” In other words, ordinary binary notions of truth and falsity, or of discovering what is right and wrong, are inapplicable when it comes to the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth — because there are no prior fixed facts about identity, or truth, or morality here to discover. All meaning is up for grabs.

Against this intellectual background, the Tavistock’s flannel about being a thoughtful service sheltering from the storm of our present culture wars starts to make more sense. At least historically, senior clinicians at the Tavistock have never believed there is anything but certain context-bound forms of thought, floating about in a post-modern void. They have assumed meaning is constructed, not found. They have denied that there is any certain or timeless knowledge, but only specific cultural dynamics to navigate in the here and now. Under such an approach, what else could you do but be “thoughtful”?

A recognition of ambiguity within the life of the psyche would be perfectly fine — indeed, I assume, therapeutically helpful — if all that had ever happened at GIDS was that people sat around talking to one other. But the general relativist stance of senior clinicians was made incredibly dangerous for patients by the presence of an additional factor in the therapeutic mix, nestling somewhat anomalously among Di Ceglie’s stated foundational aims for his service. Alongside commonplace psychodynamic goals such as “to ameliorate associated behavioural, emotional and relationship difficulties”, “to allow mourning processes to occur”, “to enable symbol formation and symbolic thinking” and “to sustain hope”, we also find: “to encourage exploration of the mind-body relationship by promoting close collaboration among professionals in different specialities, including paediatric endocrinology.”

I don’t know about you, but when I read this, the birds — or rather the mermaids, perhaps — stop singing...

 

Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee

At Amazon,Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee.

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (Box Set)

A great Christmas gift, at Amazon, A Game of Thrones / A Clash of Kings / A Storm of Swords / A Feast of Crows / A Dance with Dragons.

Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara

At Amazon, Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara.

Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

At Amazon, Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive).

Also, mass-market paperback version here.

Terry Goodkind, Wizard's First Rule

At Amazon, Terry Goodkind, Wizard's First Rule (Sword of Truth, Book 1).

T. H. White, The Once and Future King

At Amazon, T. H. White, The Once and Future King.

Gail Z. Martin, The Summoner

I'm on a fantasy posting jag, lol.

Here's more, at Amazon, Gail Z. Martin, The Summoner (Chronicles of the Necromancer, Book 1).

Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

More of the best fantasy, at Amazon, Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear.

Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time, Boxed Set

Great for under the Christmas tree.

At Amazon, Robert Jordan, "The Wheel of Time," Boxed Set I, Books 1-3: The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn.

Also, "The Wheel of Time," Boxed Set II, Books 4-6: The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos.

Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt

You'll get hooked once you sink into Robert Jordan's "Eye of the World" series.

Fantastic reading.

Here's the second volume, at Amazon, Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, Book 2).

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Okay, today I'm reading Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, Book 1), and Ken Davenport, The Two Gates.

I've been collecting more fantasy novels, though, and will be able to get to some of them over the winter break, and next summer.

For example, Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind.