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Fiona Phillips

@fsrphil.bsky.social

650 followers 290 following 22 posts

Classicist & Historian / Oxford grad student | Carian epigraphy, Anatolian alphabets, Hecatomnid shenanigans | 🏳️‍⚧️ she/her

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Fiona Phillips

@fsrphil.bsky.social

That’s too kind of you — it really is a good book!

November 5, 2025 at 3:46 PM

Fiona Phillips

@fsrphil.bsky.social

@theirisproject.bsky.social

November 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM

Fiona Phillips

@fsrphil.bsky.social

For anybody interested in the subject who can’t make it, I highly recommend the recent book by @dannybate.bsky.social, which has inspired a lot of our activities.

November 5, 2025 at 12:58 PM

Fiona Phillips

@fsrphil.bsky.social

Our stall will feature a handful of my homemade wax tablets (the ancient iPad), as well as the opportunity to learn which historical alphabet best suits your name, and how to best create your own alphabet.

November 5, 2025 at 12:57 PM

Reposted by Fiona Phillips

Lee Hurley

@hleehurley.com

This is just the NHS admitting they are denying treatent to trans children

‘Holistic’ care not hormones for children’s gender treatment on NHS
Ben Spencer - Science Editor

Camilla Kingdon, a paediatrician, says the subject has been “toxic”.
No new prescriptions for cross-sex hormones have been issued to children since the controversial Tavistock gender clinic in London was replaced a year ago, NHS leaders have said.

The new NHS children’s gender service prioritises “holistic” care for children with gender dysphoria rather than fast-tracking them on to hormones, an accusation that was levelled at the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) before it closed in March last year.

The service, which is running at Great Ormond Street in London, Alder Hey in Liverpool and Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, has also prescribed no new puberty blockers, which are banned until a clinical trial starts later this year, pending ethical approval.

It marks a fundamental switch in approach to the treatment of children with gender dysphoria, with doctors slowing down the route to prescribing hormonal drugs.

Between April 2018 and December 2022, a fifth of patients referred to Gids were put on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or both.

A year ago, a review of the Tavistock service by the paediatrician Baroness Cass criticised the “greater readiness” to use hormones for gender dysphoria despite “remarkably weak evidence” for their use.

Her report said: “Some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches to holistic assessment, which has meant that this group of young people have been exceptionalised compared to other young people with similarly complex presentations. They deserve very much better.”

Cross-sex hormones induce physical changes to allow patients to develop bodily features that align with a different gender identity.

Those born male take oestrogen to develop breasts and redistribute fat and muscle mass; those born female take testosterone to deepen the voice, increase muscle mass and develop facial and body hair. Children prescribed the drugs at the Tavistock are continuing to receive their prescriptions.

James Palmer, NHS England’s national medical director for specialised services, stressed that the door for the new prescription of cross-sex hormones was still open. “There may be a circumstance where it is important for care,” he said.

“The services need the option of taking someone into masculinising or feminising hormones, if that really is the most important thing to be done. But the services have not identified an individual yet for whom it would be a really important bit of their care pathway.”

If doctors decide there is a case for hormones to be prescribed, the decision must be agreed by a national multidisciplinary team of experts, chaired by Camilla Kingdon, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

She said the new service was about more than hormones. “This is not just about endocrinology. It’s about a holistic assessment of a child or young person within the context of their family.

“That means very detailed assessments looking at the child’s wider physical health, mental health, thinking about the child in the context of their school and so on. It involves psychologists, psychiatrists, paediatricians, clinical nurse specialists, speech therapists, occupational therapists.”

Recruitment has begun to open a fourth gender centre at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, with eight planned across the country, each seeing 25 new child patients a month. Kingdon, who also chairs the provider network of new NHS gender clinics, said finding staff has been a struggle. “That’s due to the politicised and sometimes toxic nature of this topic,” she said. “It’s not necessarily the sort of environment that has people queueing up to work in it.”

Palmer said a particular challenge had been navigating “a hugely divided lobby of stakeholders”, adding: “There’s the very liberal end of the spectrum that think [we should focus purely] on access to a transitional arrangement. At the other end, people say NHS resources should not be spent on this area at all.”

Great Ormond Street and Alder Hey children’s gender services opened in June and Bristol started seeing patients in November. So far, 250 children have been seen, with a waiting list of 6,000 that is coming down after peaking in February.

“When we started, we had some individuals waiting for more than six years to be seen,” Palmer said. “By the summer, if our maths is correct, no one will be waiting for more than four years to be seen, but it will take another three or four years to get to ... something much more manageable.”

April 6, 2025 at 8:31 AM

Fiona Phillips

@fsrphil.bsky.social

I like Tolga Örnek’s 20003 “docu-drama” on the Hittites, with both Jeremy Irons and real spoken Hittite(!). A bit silly at times but very well-researched youtu.be/_9S40sXeJ2k?...