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Resurrected the blog so I can post the text of another letter to my MP. She’s just posted a survey to constituents about a social media ban. It’s nice to have that, but didn’t leave me much room for explanation about my concerns. So I wrote all this out. Feel free to steal all or bits of it for yourself.

Dear Ms Cadbury,

I much appreciate the survey you’ve sent out to collect feelings on social media for under 16s and adults, and whether a ban is appropriate.

While the survey is much appreciated, I didn’t find I had the opportunity in it to give a more detailed response to why I am very much against a ban despite me having concerns about the impact of social media and the internet more generally on under 16s.

There are two particular key points:

• a ban can only be implemented by an age check which requires adults to give details, making anonymous use of parts of social media much more difficult, impacting the ability of people to speak out freely there without facing undue repercussions, e.g. ‘doxxing’ and harrassment, and requiring more and more personal data to be put online where it may be stolen in hacks.
• social media has upsides and downsides for under 16s. While there is harmful content out there, there is much community building for children in minority groups who are isolated, or those seeking support for mental health in situations where they are not in a position to turn to their parents or guardians.

I’m worried about a broad attack on internet access for children, where it’s an important skill to learn and an important resource for them to seek help. When I watch the campaign of Esther Ghey to introduce a social media or phone ban for children, I am deeply concerned as her daughter was killed by people she knew in real life, and not simply by social media. Discussing Brianna’s own use of social media is a deeply worrying form of victim blaming. In https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68494417 it is said that

“Brianna, who was transgender, struggled with her mental health, a situation exacerbated by accessing eating-disorder and self-harm content online.”

That Brianna found such content is more likely a result of her unfortunate mental health, rather than a cause of it. These reports persistently ignore the safe and supportive communities she found.

According to https://xtramagazine.com/power/politics/brianna-ghey-social-media-trans-youth-263868 she in fact met her killers offline, not online:

“Brianna was an isolated, bullied trans child, more endangered within her real-life environment than her online one—her “inclusivity unit” classes for vulnerable students were where she met her killers. Her vulnerability was inextricable from her position as a trans child. “

Online social communities can be a lifeline for isolated, abused, or bullied children. Taking that away is harmful in itself.

I’d encourage reading the writings of neuroscientist Dr Dean Burnett on social media and phone use, starting perhaps at https://theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.substack.com/p/what-smartphones-are-doing-to-kids

The situation is far from as simple as going for an outright social media ban. Sensible limits in school and at home, and parental controls are a more appropriate way to go forward than blanket bans that may do more harm than good, and leave over 16s suddenly exposed to social media with no experience in avoiding abusive behaviour by learning to block accounts early, and by developing the skills to spot misinformation.

Moving more to the second point, the Online Safety Act has already had widescale unintended negative effects by forcing age gating. It’s resulting in the blocking of sexual health material, anti-smoking material, forces adults to put personal information in the hands of providers from which it may be stolen in hacks, and more. It limits freedom of expression to under 18s, and pushes children to less regulated spaces by techniques that are trivially achievable to a kid with a little know-how, and while not using commercial VPNs that others are seeking bans for as well.  A range of these points are summarised well at https://action.openrightsgroup.org/tell-your-mp-online-safety-act-isn’t-working

The OSA has resulted in the end of UK access for all to commonplace image sharing site imgur.com, breaking large parts of the internet where it is commonly used for hosting. It shut down a forum dedicated to keeping hamsters as pets. It shut down a cycling forum, one on sustainable living, and more. This social media ban will further disrupt the ability of communities to form online, and not just for children, and not just for those seeking adult content.

I beg you to listen to the concerns of those seeing the unwanted side effects of these overly blunt legal instruments, and more importantly still the voices of vulnerable and marginalised groups who seek to find community and mutual support online, including children. This ban will not make bullying disappear, and it will not stop further tragic events from particularly extreme forms of abuse.

What we need if anything is far more information and education for children to learn how to protect themselves online, and more information for parents on useful methods to help children be safe online. Skills that will not hurt their ability to find support, and will leave them in much better stead to face the online world as adults as well.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Blimey, I haven’t used this blog in ages. Anyway, mainly for a couple of friends, here’s the content of the letter I wrote to my MP recently to support trans kids. Welcome to use it, but you’ll probably need to adapt it quite a bit if your MP isn’t as good as mine. My MP is pictured here so I’m pretty sure she’s one of the good ones.

---

Dear Ms Cadbury,

Firstly, my congratulations on your well deserved win this general election. It was a delight to be able to vote for you again, and a joy to see you re-elected.

I’m writing to you concerning the healthcare of transgender children. Previously writing to you on transgender issues you’ve always replied positively and thoughtfully, and I’ve appreciated your work on this in the past. Your letter to Liz Truss on the conversion therapy ban was outstanding and it was a real source of happiness and inspirational to see you meeting young trans people just over a year ago to listen to them. 

Several events recently cause me to write to you again today. It upset me to see transgender rights weaponised by the Conservative Party this campaign, and I found it horrifying to see the previous government ban puberty blockers for trans children with little to no discussion, following the Cass Review and just before the dissolution of the previous parliament.

The Good Law Project has highlighted the impact this sort of ban has had. In the seven years before access to puberty blockers was restricted following the Bell case, they state that one person using Gender Identity Development Services lost their life. Since then, in the following three years, sixteen have. 

https://goodlawproject.org/rise-of-deaths-young-trans-people

While it isn’t clear how many of these deaths are suicides, the sharp rise and the known risks to transgender children and adults’ mental health when lacking gender affirming care makes it desperately concerning to me.

During the election campaign I also witnessed trans youths coming down from an occupation of a ledge at the headquarters of the NHS. Their words were inspiring, but they spoke of how desperate their circumstances were. One stated that they felt safer on the high and narrow ledge for several days than they did on NHS waiting lists for gender affirming care.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C9CD6zBC49f/ https://transkidsdeservebetter.org/about

I really hope the new government will listen to their concerns and meet their desperately urgent needs. As said by one of the youths, having to wait years for medication to prevent a puberty that would lead to far worse gender dysphoria and irreversible changes they do not wish to undergo is about as helpful as having a nine month waiting list for an abortion.

I’m optimistic and pleased at the appointment of your colleague Bridget Phillipson to the position of Minister for Women and Equalities, and hope this and the change in government overall will make for a rapid reversal of the previous government’s decisions on these matters.

Lastly, on the subject of the Cass Review, I know the transgender community and the LGBTQ+ community that support them more widely were horrified by the nomination of Dr Hilary Cass for a life peerage in the dissolution honours. As the Good Law Project mentioned the review has had a devastating effect. Labour’s past acceptance of the Review was a huge disappointment, with Wes Streeting’s moves to accept the recommendations very saddening to see.

The review has been criticised by WPATH, who said that it “is rooted in the false premise that non-medical alternatives to care will result in less adolescent distress”. A report led by the Law School at Yale, with authors from numerous other institutes including medical schools gives a detailed breakdown of the flaws in the review (https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity-project_cass-response.pdf) as does a second academic study led by the University of Galway with substantial contributions from UK academics and doctors (https://osf.io/preprints/osf/uhndk).

I feel strongly having read the Cass Review and its criticisms that the flaws in the report should be taken much more seriously by the government and the implementation of its recommendations urgently reconsidered, as transgender children are now facing such disastrous mental health and at huge risk of suicide and self harm, and that the peerage for Dr Cass might be reviewed if possible.

I hope you can raise this with Mr Streeting and other health ministers as soon as possible so that effective healthcare can be returned to these children without delay.

Thank you for taking the time to read my concerns and I hope you will continue to listen to trans youths on this as you have done before, and I’m hugely grateful for the work you continue to do for our constituency and country.

Yours with thanks,

Dr Edd Edmondson

edit: I now recommend you use Singularity to get Tensorflow up in an Ubuntu 16 LTS image.

Following on from more manual instructions posted before, just a quick mention that to install Tensorflow 1.8 on CentOS 6, or presumably RHEL 6 and such there’s a semi-automatic script here on GitHub.

You can run this, and it’ll download dependencies, finish patching up the source and give you instructions on finishing the last few steps yourself to get a .whl file you can go and install with pip.

Tensorflow is a continuous pain to get working on any Linux other than a recent Ubuntu. Unfortunately most of my production systems are on some variant of CentOS 6…

Here’s what I currently do to get Tensorflow 1.7.0 working on it. These instructions are brief and not absolutely step by step, but you can probably figure out what to do from them, and certainly I should be able to look back at these notes and figure out what I was doing. I’m not going to do things like explicitly tell you when to cd or mkdir a new place to drop things in. There aren’t proper patchfiles. These are scribbled notes as I went along getting bits from various links around the place.

1. Download source and install to some –prefix=/location a recent binutils – 2.30 at time of writing
2. Download source and install to some –prefix=/location a recent GCC (I used 7.3.0 initially but CUDA doesn’t like GCC 6 or later, so you probably want a v5.4.0 compiler, but not v5.5 or later as that breaks stuff too! v4.9.4 didn’t work so just go with v5.4.0!) – note also there’s some references below to 7.3.0 which I’m too lazy to fix.
3. yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel
4. Grab a suitably new Python (I used an Anaconda installation)
5. Get bazel (I used v0.11.1) – make sure it’s the -dist.zip download
   Unpack bazel
6. Patch bazel – in tools/cpp/unix_cc_configure.bzl comment out
   “-B/usr/bin”,
   – it’ll be prefixed by a comment like
   # Always have -B/usr/bin, see https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/760.
   which is totally rubbish, as that very link will tell you in one of the github comments.
7. Set $PATH to add python, gcc, and binutils bin locations. Set $INCLUDE to add gcc and binutils include location. Set $LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LIBRARY_PATH to add gcc lib64 location and binutils lib location. Set $JAVA_HOME to /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0.
8. Backup if wanted, then rm -rf ~/.cache and mkdir /tmp/someplace and ln -s /tmp/someplace ~/.cache (prevents NFS headaches with bazel)
9. In bazelsrc directory do ./compile.sh, then copy resulting output/bazel somewhere and add that somewhere to $PATH
10. git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow.git
    (and checkout a specific version if wanted)
11. Patch tensorflow –
    1. tensorflow/tensorflow.bzl:

       def tf_extension_linkopts():
       
        return ["-lrt"] # No extension link opts

       (add “-lrt” inside []s)

       def tf_cc_shared_object(
       
        name,
       
        srcs=[],
       
        deps=[],
       
        linkopts=["-lrt"],

       (ditto)

        args += [src.path]
       
        outputs = [ctx.outputs.cc_out, ctx.outputs.py_out]
       
        ctx.action(
       
       use_default_shell_env = True,
       
        executable=ctx.executable._swig,
       
        arguments=args,

       (adding use_default_shell_env=True,)

    2. tensorflow/third_party/gpus/crosstool/CROSSTOOL_clang.tpl, tensorflow/third_party/gpus/crosstool/CROSSTOOL_nvcc.tpl, tensorflow/third_party/sycl/crosstool/CROSSTOOL.tpl, tensorflow/third_party/toolchains/cpus/arm/CROSSTOOL.tpl, tensorflow/third_party/toolchains/gpus/crosstool/CROSSTOOL,
       change “-B/usr/bin” to “-B/path/to/binutils/bin”
    3. tensorflow/third_party/gpus/crosstool/CROSSTOOL_nvcc.tpl
       change
       linker_flag: “-Wl,-no-as-needed”
       to
       linker_flag: “-Wl,-R/share/apps/gnu/gcc/7.3.0/lib64,-no-as-needed”
       Change /usr/bin paths for ar, compat-ld, ld, nm, objcopy, objdump, strip to installed binutils and cpp to installed gcc
       After
       cxx_builtin_include_directory: “/”
       add
       cxx_builtin_include_directory: “/path/to/gcc/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/7.3.0/include”
       cxx_builtin_include_directory: “/path/to/gcc/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/7.3.0/include-fixed”
       cxx_builtin_include_directory: “/path/to/include/c++/7.3.0”
12. Configure tensorflow – most defaults should be ok especially if it picks your python up correctly. Notable exception – answer no to jemalloc question.
13. bazel build –config=opt //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package may also need –config=cuda
14. bazel-bin/tensorflow/tools/pip_package/build_pip_package /tmp/tensorflow_pkg
15. Find .whl file in /tmp/tensorflow_pkg, copy it somewhere safe and pip install tensorflow-….longname.whl

Note – –verbose_failures is a useful flag at the bazel build stage.

(You can comment below but I’m unlikely to offer much help. I’ve had enough of this.)