October 31, 2023 - 1:00pm
On Monday in the Free Press, Riittakerttu Kaltiala issued a warning to US gender clinicians: “Gender-affirming care is dangerous. I know because I helped pioneer it.”
Kaltiala serves as chief psychiatrist in the department of adolescent psychiatry at Tampere University in Finland, and is the head of one of the country’s two nationalised gender services for youth. In the Free Press piece, Kaltiala describes her disillusionment with a “gender-affirming” approach to gender-distressed youth, starting with her initial scepticism about “being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender”.
Kaltiala noticed early on that her patients did not look or sound like those which other clinics claimed to have treated with such success. More troubled, her patients’ distress often started at puberty rather than early childhood. Starting around 2015, Kaltiala noticed a sudden, unexplained surge in adolescent girls seeking transition. These new patients delivered scripted responses, “telling the same life stories and the same anecdotes about their childhoods, including their sudden realisation that they were transgender”.
Eventually, detransitioners started showing up at the clinic, too: “These were another kind of patient who wasn’t supposed to exist,” Kaltiala notes. She goes on:
Kaltiala set about researching her questions and concerns. What she found helped lead Finland to change course on youth gender medicine, but she observed that “instead of acknowledging the problems we described, [the field] became more committed to expanding these treatments.”
These dynamics produced the sprawling medical scandal we see today. At the 2022 World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference, clinicians praised themselves and one another for overcoming their reservations and doubts about providing “gender-affirming care” to an ever-widening group of patients. Naturally, the doctors did not put their accomplishments in those terms. Instead, they spoke of “checking their cisgender privilege” and “following [their] patients’ lead”.
One plastic surgeon took the microphone to recount the first time a patient requested “gender nullification” surgery, which initially unsettled him. He wasn’t sure it was wise — or ethical — to fulfil the request. Having overcome his reservations, though, he now performs “lots” of these surgeries. One of his colleagues chirped, “I feel like we’re all just winging it and maybe we can wing it together,” before proposing Pinterest boards as a way to keep track of unconventional surgical desires.
Another doctor lamented the fact that patients may be “forced to choose between dissociative identity disorder and gender dysphoria”, since so many clinicians baulk at operating on patients whose “alters” disagree about which surgical interventions to pursue.
It’s hard to think of another field that has gone so obviously off the rails. To get here, clinicians and medical organisations had to discard everything they knew about medical ethics, child development and literature on desistance. The conference was a fortress, buttressed against all doubts and challenges. Within the walls of the conference centre, no serious questions were raised. I got the sense that clinicians had worked hard to lull something inside themselves to sleep and now feared waking it.
At the European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Ireland earlier this year, outgoing president Joz Motmans said, “We respect everyone’s freedom of speech, but we choose not to listen to it.” The packed auditorium broke into applause.
The speech these organisations “choose not to listen” to is speech like Kaltiala’s, who comes bearing clear evidence of medical harm, regret, and detransition. “Medical organisations are supposed to transcend politics in favour of upholding standards that protect patients,” she writes. “However, in the US these groups […] have been actively hostile to the message my colleagues and I are urging.”
Kaltiala’s personal story is a remarkable one. It’s never easy to admit that one has taken a wrong turn, even without facing harassment and threats from trans activists for doing so. In the United States, the embattled mentality of gender clinicians and the ideological capture of medical professional associations makes it unlikely such a reckoning will come from the inside. But warnings and revelations from across the ocean may yet wash up on their shores.
Eliza Mondegreen is a graduate student in psychiatry and the author of Writing Behavior on Substack.
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SubscribeOver the last 50 years a discourse has been systematically manufactured in the West, starting in academia and spreading outwards, within which it is heresy to question whatever an approved oppressed minority group, or those who claim to speak for them, has to say, especially about themselves.
Fanatics proactively nurture this discourse for political and personal ends. Well-meaning people go along with it because they don’t want to seem “unkind”. Everyone else is at best dismissed as unenlightened or gets shouted down as a “fascist”.
Now the latest approved oppressed minority group off the cab rank is trans people. No matter how ridiculous, ahistorical and unscientific their claims about themselves, it is heresy according to progressive orthodoxy to question them. Eddie Izzard claims to have both “boy and girl DNA” and yet is still apparently a credible parliamentary candidate. Emily Bridges calls the decision to restrict the female category in cycling to females “Genocide”, yet rather than be universally denounced for comparing her hurt fee-fees to the systematic murder of millions, she gets a Vogue profile.
Medical science should have been the bastion of reason which held out against this gathering endarkenment. But unfortunately it has not been the case and that failure is written in the bodies of children who have had life-altering surgery before they were possibly old enough to understand what cutting off healthy body parts would mean for the rest of their lives.
What we are seeing is the logical and inevitable consequence of failing to learn and apply Orwell’s most important message. Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. If that is granted, all else follows.
Keep up R M;in fact the latest minority group is Asexuals who have a grift and entitlement operation that is even more deranged and meaningless than the Trans brigade. Maybe you should get an app to alert you in future as the next victims surface and you need never be caught out again.
My bad.
It’s so hard to keep in front of such a tidal wave of gobbledegook.
On the plus, recently indoctrinated graduates cannot keep up and instead of being one of the ‘morally upright’ crusaders they find themselves in the ‘wrong’, which means their indoctrination is unlikely to last: the woke eat their own.
Wanting not to be abused is no grift.
Grooming children to believe that they can be something they can never actually be, and encouraging them to take life altering medication and surgeries to do so, is abuse!
“Grooming children to believe that they can be something they can never actually be” <– That is not what is happening, so, your statement has no validity. Your ilk are the ones insisting they be something they are not. You are the child abusers.
You seriously think that “gender affirmation surgery” changes a male (sex) into a female (sex)?
I know perfectly well gender affirmation surgery changes the masculine vs feminine capabilities of someone’s sex just exacty as described to the people seeking such, and that they are quite happy with the results compared to not.
I know such surgeries are on occasion as a result of disease, birth defect, or injury, offered to cisgender people — who are generally equally happy with the results.
I know that when “grown in a tank” organs become available for gender transition purposes, that won’t make you any happier.
Your objection is philosophical, not factual.
Surgical mutilation is preferable to being called “sir” whilst wearing a dress?
There is no such surgical mutilation.
Transgender people have only been in existence the whole of humanity’s existence, so, you are only an ignorant confabulator.
Progressivism in all it’s forms is the Endarkenment, the get of Rousseau. Social Conservatism only one of it’s forms.
“Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. If that is granted, all else follows.” <– And you seek to impose exterminationist tyranny on transgender people.
Who wants this? Where did you read that RM seeks to impose exterminationist tyranny on trans people?
That is what measures to prohibit transgender healthcare and safe existence are — exterminationist.
Another way of looking at it is to say that transitioning minors is a way of exterminating homosexual people.
Only if someone was exterminated and only if they were homosexual to start with. And they are not. Of course, being gay or not has no relevance. Roughly 1/3rd of transgender people are straight, 1/3rd are bi, and 1/3rd are gay.
The idea people are made transgender in keeping with any standards of care because they are gay is a myth — in the West, per WPATH standards of care.
Under their Moslem totalitarianism, Iranian gays are forced to undergo a sex change or be executed.
This is what happens when the dogma of a cult or religion meets the challenge of reality. The cultist has a choice to question their dogma or, being unable to cope with the emotional cost of doing so, more typically escalates to the next level of fantastical beliefs. In this case, when the fantastical belief that people can “change sex” is challenged, it is escalated to “and people who deny this want to exterminate trans people”.
Personally I have no problem acknowledging that trans people exist and have not said otherwise. By which I mean people who choose to present to the world using cultural artefacts of the opposite sex. Whether this has been for the whole of humanity’s existence I wouldn’t like to say. But certainly for a very long time. Nor do I have problem supporting their right to live in peace and dignity. As everyone should be able to. In personal interactions I’ll even refer to them by their preferred pronouns if they like, regardless of the fact I find it ridiculous.
But let’s not mistake my tolerance of other’s lifestyles with affirmation of their every claim about themselves. I do not believe that trans people have changed sex. I do not believe that a man presenting as a woman should have rights to access spaces which have been set aside for the legitimate purposes of women’s safety, dignity, fairness etc. And I do not believe that children should be “affirmed” into cutting off healthy body parts and taking life-altering drugs at ages where they are legally not allowed to give consent to having a tattoo.
Above all else, people should not be compelled to silence or acquiescence to such claims from trans people and their activist fellow travellers. If you choose to believe that 2+2=5 and tell that to the world, that is your right. The rest of us have the right to continue believing that 2+2=4 and saying it.
“This is what happens when the dogma of a cult or religion meets the challenge of reality.” <– Exactly. Social Conservatism is exactly such dogma.
“I do not believe that trans people have changed sex” <– And so you confess your dogma, or that you are a blithering imbecile or gibbering maniac. After all, if no sex is changed, you are complaining about nothing at all aren’t you?
What you mean is you simply deny everything exists about this that you don’t like or would not accept for yourself, but then no one is proposing you be made to do this. You however are instead insisting you can legitimately prevent other people from benefiting from this, as you are under the delusion they don’t genuinely benefit from it.
There is no such thing as a p***s being healthy when grown onto a girl. There is no such thing as a vulva being healthy when grown onto a boy. It is known to be a certainty fact that it is what is between the ears and not the legs that makes someone a boy or a girl. You have no evidence to the contrary. That the mechanical organs of the sex are paramount in animals might be true, but humanity is not so simple. It is a certainty that being transgender is a physical variance of birth which exists far more commonly than once was thought. So what? The incidence of people being gay or bisexual has also quite increased from the days when the word “faggot” came to have it derogatory meaning, and they are better days now than in part that we quit executing gay people — you Social Conservatives will lose this fight to enshrine the abuse in law and policy of transgender people, and children, as well.
This is a small measure of what is real about it, and the whole consistent with it:
https://taliaperkinssspace.quora.com/People-are-born-transgender-they-are-not-mentally-ill-it-is-no-paraphilia-it-is-a-physical-variance-from-the-usual-at
Reject your dogma and admit reality.
Thank you for reply, Talia, but I’m sorry to say that in amongst your word salad and personal insults its quite hard to discern a cogent argument to respond to.
I will do my best to respond to specific points you raise:
No this doesn’t follow because you’ve misrepresented what my objections are. I have never been bothered by people changing sex because this is not a real thing. Nor do I have any particular objection to people simply claiming to have changed sex. I am perfectly happy to leave people alone in their delusions so long as they don’t interfere with others.
What I object to is people insisting that their claim to have changed sex affords them rights which conflict with the rights of others.
Absolutely not. I have been explicit that I do not seek to deny that trans people exist. Nor that they are entitled to live their lives in peace and safety. I simply do not accept that the fact of their existence leads to the conclusions which the trans rights movement insists upon (e.g. the right to participate in the women’s category in competitive sports).
This is exactly what trans rights activists are doing. “No debate” and Self-ID are a demand that I and everyone else accept their claims without right to reply or question.
Deleted after the link went through.
“5th generation warfare is all other traditional forms of warfare combined with the assault on perception and reality that we have all become accustomed to since Covid. Globalists seek to provoke this global hybrid civil war, where various intersectional groups in Western societies turn on one another, so as to manufacture a pretext to further securitise Western societies in the name of an ‘emergency.” Maajid Nawaz
It is not hard to find evidence of this. The two tier policing is aimed at provoking, DEI. Critical Race Theory are intended to provoke anger and reaction.
What people forget is that, while the ugly duckling eventually transformed into a beautiful swan, it was never a duckling and always a swan to begin with.
Kaltiala is up against the remorseless certainty of the Talia Perkinses of the world who assert “gender affirming care has a 99%+ accuracy rate in predicting whom will benefit from gender affirming surgery contrary to birth sex …One goes to Genspect because you prefer a dead or miserable child over one happy in a way you do not like.”
The ideologue with cast-iron certainty in the truth of their dodgy statistics and assertions can often sweep aside the careful consideration of someone who has been drawn slowly and perhaps reluctantly to a different conclusion by the accumulation of evidence that undermines the ideologue’s belief.
Let us hope Kaltiala does actually get a hearing despite the fanatical commitment of the enthusiasts and the self-interest of the surgeons and pharmacologists supporting “trans care”.
Here is the link.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33968550/
And yet, neither Kaltialta nor you can show it is any greater than 1% with any like confidence level. There are almost 8000 data points in that work, almost enough to be statistically definitive for the whole human species, ad of course it is about a far less numerous subsample. And, the lie is told here Kaltiala is a founder of gender affirming care, when in fact she is a career long opponent of it.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
Social Conservatives are the false ones in this.
I think Dr. Gad Saad refers to this as a mind virus, which is killing common sense and rationale debate. Sadly for the west, medical care is hardly alone when it comes to the mind virus. We see it with;
Open borders
Net zero
Defund the police
Critical race theory
Free money
Imaging sitting through a DEI struggle session. You don’t believe anything you’re being told, you know no one else in the room believes it, yet everyone is nodding their head in agreement.
Indeed it’s similar to the Soviet Union or modern North Korea. A yuge % of people know its all BS, but they have to go along for fear of losing their job
Welcome to the Soyviet Union
North Koreans are not only in fear of losing their jobs but their relative freedom and even their lives. Citizens there are spied on by their own colleagues and families and misspeaking can lead to dire consequences.
A version of this is coming our way fast. Maajid Nawaz and others describe it as 5th Generation Warfare. Along with conventional war there is an “assault on perception and reality that we have all become accustomed to since Covid. Globalists seek to provoke this global hybrid civil war, where various intersectional groups in Western societies turn on one another, so as to manufacture a pretext to further securitise Western societies in the name of an ‘emergency.”
Quacks refer to things as they please, and ignore evidence. Like you and Kaltiala.
Imagine DEI or any of that has anything to do with reality, or that your abusive views of transgender people do? No, there’s no drug on earth strong enough to do that — only hateful bigotry.
I have zero issue with trans people. Adults should be free to do whatever they choose, as long as they don’t impose their beliefs or actions on others. Life altering medical interventions for children is a completely different issue of course.
“I have zero issue with trans people.” <– Yes you do, you desire their misery.
“Adults should be free to do whatever they choose, as long as they don’t impose their beliefs or actions on others.” <– Which of course is the imposition you are making.
“Life altering medical interventions for children is a completely different issue of course.” <– No, it is not. In the first place because it is not your place to choose or forbid. There is also the matter of a ticking clock which can not be stopped, they should be allowed to undergo the puberty they choose “on time”, for which you can name no consequence of consequence — nothing worth their misery.
Doing so only offends your moral vanity that the matter is yours to bind and loose.
Cheap emotional talking points. I say I have zero issues with trans people. You have no idea who I am, what I stand for, yet insist I desire their misery. Sounds more like an emotional rant than an argument. How exactly am I imposing myself on trans people?
Children should not undergo life altering medical treatment because they are children. They are not mature enough to make decisions that will impact them forever. This isn’t some radical theory. There are many laws that restrict children from many things for this reason precisely.
Very few children still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks. The exact number varies by study, but roughly 60–90% of trans- kids turn out no longer to be trans by adulthood.
Puberty is not a choice. It is something that happens naturally, that is unavoidable. If some people think you can interfere with this doesn’t make it true. This should be self evident to anyone who isn’t captured by ideology.
Pretend all you want that you are the blessed one who only cares about what’s best for children. Pretend all you want that this is all well-researched science, but there’s a reason almost all clinics and professional associations not dominated by Americans use the watchful waiting approach.
Anyone who truly cares about gender dysphoric children will give them the care and support they need without life altering medical interventions.
“Cheap emotional talking points.” <– You would say that no matter what.
“I say I have zero issues with trans people.” <– And then prove to the contrary.
“You have no idea who I am, what I stand for,” <– I read your deliberately ignorant, bigoted nonsense here on this topic.
“How exactly am I imposing myself on trans people?” <– By advocating here for policies which injure them desperately and lifelong. By your impossible proposition that compelled sins of omission are virtues.
“Children should not … altering medical interventions.” <– Every bit of that is an outright lie where it is not a deceit.
Not one word of it is real and relevant.
In particular, the idea that most children “desist” or stop being transgender is a fraud produced most notably by Kenneth Zucker, for which he was “struck off”. He claimed all children brought to him whom he thought were in any way “pre-transgender” (his solipsistic category never supported by any data but his own) were “cured” by his conversion therapy, and he only counted as “uncured” those whom he knew had surgically transitioned. He counted as “cured” those who quit talking to him for any reason — and he has no idea whether they went onto transition happily or not.
The fact is when actually measured by DSM V/ICD10 and current and next most recent revisions of the WPATH Standards of Care, these statistics are obtained as related here.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/detransitioner-wave-fails-to-materialize
More clinically backed up by work such this:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150129132924.htm
And even of those professional detransitioners who were darlings of you Social Conservatives, of whom there are about 10 now being feted by you, these two have resumed transition.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/11/darling-detransition-movement-comes-transgender/
https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/20/this-morning-trans-woman-speaks-about-detransitioning-17602582/
The fact is you have no idea what you are talking about where you are not deliberately lying, and you don’t care.
Deleted after the link went through.
It is not possible to go through opposite sex puberty. Yes, you can block birth sex puberty, yes, you can take cross sex hormones and acquire thereby a few of the secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex, but puberty is more than this. It includes sexual maturity, IE the full functionality of one’s birth sex and ability to procreate. Cross sex hormones cannot bring a child to sexual maturity. They remain sexually immature, with a few features of the opposite sex.
It is also as yet unknown whether children complete their neurocognitive development if they are blocked from going through their birth sex puberty
The idea that this requires “research” at all is the greatest crime. Surgically mutilating a teenager during the most unstable, emotionally fragile time in his or her life is beyond monstrous. It’s still hard for me to believe those who are or have been committing these shocking crimes are not only not in prison, but enjoying the support of their hideous governments and institutions that condone, no, encourage it – for fat wads of cash.
Court cases just stsrting in US. Let’s see …..
No, they’ve been going on for decades. A handful at a time. Never more than a scant single digit percent of what there should be, if gender affirming care and transition is the falsity Social Conservatives claim it is. You are only off by several orders of magnitude to even be at merely par to the acknowledged regret rate.
Transwomen can be beautiful, but they should be adults who have already experienced a little of a gay, feminine life and are sure about the changes ahead.
Only up to the moment when they pull out their wangers, Tyler.
Some can and some can look like they’ve just walked off the set of one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, with eyes looking in different directions and sparse spurts of hair. Wearing no makeup, men’s shoes and something they picked out of a charity shop that “might” fit…ish.
i also suspect there are now more autogynophiles that gay base trans women. Which when you think about it, it’s akin to walking about in a gimp suit, if that’s what grooves your truffles!
totally agree that it’s a matter for adults and children should be kept well out of it!
What excuse do you have for wanting to condemn some boys to have breasts and periods, and some girls to have beards and deep voices?
No one is condemning them to anything. Once they are legal consenting age, they should be free to do whatever they choose.
Stop lying. Yes you are. The consequences of the unwanted puberty are only partially correctable by medical technology, and you have no right to steal from them their opportunity to avoid it.
You also have no excuse to do so. You have no justification for it at all. The sole possible excuse you might have is if more people who transition beginning when youth regret it than not, instead you are off by not even possibly less than an order of magnitude, and in fact the actual regret rate appears to be 1%.
What excuse do you pretend you have?
What exactly is unwanted puberty? Puberty if a fact of life. There are no long term studies because this is all new. Gender dysphoria has exploded in the last decade. To pretend otherwise is willful ignorance. You can shout and scream all you like, but it doesn’t make you right and it doesn’t make you more caring.
We have all kinds of laws to protect children from themselves. This is not new. Affirming whatever a child wants today is not love and care. This never used to be controversial.
“What exactly is unwanted puberty” <– Oh dear! Do you need to relearn English?
“Puberty if a fact of life.” <– So what? Which flavor is the question, not whether.
“There are no long term studies because this is all new.” <– Merely a lie. It has been almost 100 years since Western medicine began to look at the medical problem of it, and more than two decades since gender affirming care was adopted.
“Gender dysphoria has exploded in the last decade. To pretend otherwise is willful ignorance.” <– No, liar, the recognition of it and availability of treatment has increased.
“You can shout … you more caring.” <– You can lie all you like, you can’t make it real — and that is what you are trying to do.
“We have all … children from themselves” <– So what? Not all children are the same. Some need a cast, some need insulin. Some provably benefit immensely from medically assisted transition in apparent gender to match their actual gender — which affects about 1 in 150, and is undertaken with more than 99% accuracy.
“Affirming whatever a child wants today is not love and care.” <– Which puerile, deceitful appeal to it only being a matter of “today” is only a deceit. 99+% accuracy, from data taken over decades including that most recent one.
“This never used to be controversial.” <– It is not controversial. Your pretense that is what this is about is new. This is not about “children” as an undifferentiated population, but solely about those who meet the WPATH standards of care for medically assisted transition in their apparent gender.
STOP LYING!
You can call me liar all you want, but facts are facts. There is no long term studies of gender dysphoria because the diagnosis has exploded. In Britain, less than 100 young people received gender treatment in 2010. That number exploded by 4,000% in 10 years to 2,500 in 2018. That’s less than five years ago. I repeat, there are no long term studies. On top of that, there were virtually no young girls getting medical treatment 10 years ago. That number is now double of boys.
Go ahead. Wish it away. Pretend we all hate trans kids and you’re on the side of angels. You’re not fooling anyone. You’re an hysterical ideologue. Stomp your feet, yell and scream. I’ll stick to facts.
What about the unimaginable damage inflicted on the families cast aside? What about the serious health consequences that keep emerging —heart attacks, strokes, vaginal atrophy, sterility, hair loss, premature menopause, hysterectomies? Your cavalier attitude is belied by the irreversible consequences left for families to deal with when it all crashes down.
“What about the unimaginable damage inflicted on the families cast aside?” <– What families cast aside? By whom? It is families filled with people like you who cast aside transgender people.
There are no serious health consequences “emerging”, there is a propaganda campaign exaggerating the fact the hormonal risk profile becomes identical to that of the sex the HRT emulates. No actual increase in HRT risk persists after current bioidentical dosing and substances is employed (possibly the socialist NHS is using far more cheap drugs than they haveany right to?).
“vaginal atrophy, sterility, hair loss, premature menopause, hysterectomies?” <– You appear to be referring to things which transgender men undergo quite deliberately. You “Anna” would hate them, you aren’t them.
Stop lying to yourself and others to pretend desired results are “irreversible consequences”.
And I should be free to laugh at them
Ok. And others should be free to consider you beneath contempt — after all, you are a worse person than someone who set fire to cats for the glee you take in it.
Dude, you lost the argument about 20 paragraphs ago. Live any way you like; people don’t care. Tattoo you face, split your tongue, gauge your nostrils, dye you eyeballs pink, have at it. Demand that for a child under 18, you’re going to get a fight.
I’m not a “dude”, and no, the argument is not lost. I am not even so much arguing with the bigots here, I am factually informing the uncommitted.
“Demand that for a child under 18, you’re going to get a fight.” <– Which has all of nothing to do with it.
That is why and how you will lose this argument.
Calm down my man.
And of course Social Conservatives, being a flavor of progressive, always lie.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/abusive-practices-and-conversion
Among other deceits, Kaltiala is no founder of gender affirming care, she is a career long opponent of it.
This is what is tiny sample of what is real about people who are transgender :
https://taliaperkinssspace.quora.com/People-are-born-transgender-they-are-not-mentally-ill-it-is-no-paraphilia-it-is-a-physical-variance-from-the-usual-at
And there is no evidence against it.
Yes, Quora is the leader of reliable websites, or more accurately, Bob, Brittany and Arora answer your questions about everything. I also rely on people who live online.
That is a link to a list of links which prove my point, generally scientific research papers. I know already you can not refute them.
No harm intended, but your links seem to have been written by people who share your beliefs, but can provide no real ‘scientific’ evidence for them. ‘Gender Theory’ itself is a false concept, a product of imagination not science, so there can be no such thing as ‘transgender’. Judith Butler has a lot to answer for.
‘No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot!’….
That is not directed at you Martin it was to underline your post re scientific evidence…
Hmmm…Talia, Talia?… Why do you sound so familiar? Titania! Andrew Doyle, is that you!