Prior to the recent Cass review,[1] the NHS review of services for gender confused children[2] and the closure of the Tavistock[3], gender confused children in the United Kingdom were frequently “socially transitioned,” then given puberty blockers, and then wrong sex hormones on the NHS. Social transition involves calling the child by opposite sex pronouns and treating them as if they were the opposite sex, and giving them access to opposite sex spaces and sports.
Medical childhood transition is step further. The aim of giving children puberty blockers is to stop their natural puberty so that they can be given wrong sex hormones when they reach an age to make that decision. Puberty blockers are advertised as a “pause button” for puberty. They are not. They stop normal sexual development of the child, resulting in lifelong anorgasmia, infertility, brittle bones, irreversible physical changes, and a long list of other health problems, including osteoporosis, failure to grow, liver damage and mental health problems.
Puberty blockers also stop the development of normal, adult sexuality to most, if not all individuals who are given them before puberty. The sexual organs do not fully develop meaning that males who have been given these drugs have to have a “neo-vagina” constructed from bowel instead of their inverted genitals. The hormonal profiles necessary to desire often do not develop either. There is a strong argument to be made that sex hormones at puberty impact not just on the body, but on brain development, meaning that individuals given puberty blockers in childhood may never develop fully adult independence or reasoning. They become technical adults, but it could be argued that in important senses, remain children.
Giving a child puberty blockers is, then, a drastic, life altering intervention. If you were a doctor treating a child for cancer, or for a terrible, life altering or even life ending disease, and you had a treatment option with the side effects of puberty blockers, you would still give very serious thought to whether this was the right option. You would exhaust all other options first. But “gender dysphoria” is not a life threatening condition. My wife lives with it and has done as long as she can remember. It can be lived with. It is a set of problems that is located, not in her body, but in her head.
Psychiatry and medicine have a long history of attempts to treat mental health conditions with drastic physical interventions. None has been particularly edifying. Lobotomies and other psychosurgery, insulin coma therapy, chemical shock therapy and a host of other “heroic” therapies have been abandoned. Electroconvulsive therapy is still used, but only sparingly. But even in the halcyon days of physical interventions, when the workhouses were being emptied and the wayward, poor and disobedient were funnelled into the asylums, and doctors had a powerless population to experiment on, most of these interventions were done on adults. Surely things are better now, in the 21st century. Surely, we would only give children these drugs to prevent a terrible alternative? So how awful is the prognosis for these children that such a drastic intervention as puberty blockers is indicated?
If left alone to go through a puberty, 80-90% of gender confused children simply grow out of it, with many turning out to be lesbian or gay. [4] That is the terrible alternative. That they are left alone and they grow out of it. To make this worse, more than a quarter of children who present with dysphoria have associated conditions, such as autism, ADHD and OCD, with obsessive and “rigid thinking” elements that may easily explain a trans identification. [5] Perhaps worse still, Dr Az Hakim, who used to work for the Tavistock Clinic, has stated that many of the parents who present with young children who “are trans” are either worried that their child will be gay, or simply wanted a child of the opposite sex. [6] This is not a case of children with a terrible affliction being given strong medicine to alleviate unbearable suffering. This is a medical experiment on children, most of whom will just grow out of it. It is unconscionable.
If a girl likes football and thinks that makes her a boy the appropriate response is to buy her football boots and take her to practices and tell her “girls can play football too.” It is emphatically not to give her puberty blockers and stop her development. Even if a girl tells you she wants to be a boy, the appropriate response is “what is it about being a boy that you want, that you think you can’t have?” Maybe give her a book about women’s history, and help to deal with structural issues she’s currently facing at school, and maybe, depending on her reply, expose her to lesbian role models. Make sure she’s surrounded by strong women. Get her off the internet and into sports. There are any number of courses of action you can take, other than saying “yes, you are right, you really ARE a boy,” and rushing her down to the gender clinic.
On my most cynical days, and when I listen to conservative, homophobic parents, it seems to me that giving puberty blockers and wrong sex hormones to gender non-conforming teenagers could be regarded as a punishment. For what? For their difference. For what their parents fear might be a nascent homosexuality. It seems to me like a “punishment,” in the same way that the old psychosurgeries, electroconvulsive therapies and so on were punishments for social transgressions in a different era. Worse, it is a punishment which may prevent the necessary brain development that a child would need to work out the true awfulness of what has been done to them.
Imagining that children can understand or consent to “transition” is madness. The Cass review has confirmed that “affirming” a child and socially transitioning them (calling them by wrong sex pronouns etc) puts them on a path to hormones and surgeries, instead of on a path of accepting themselves how they are. And adult transition often has a sexual element. Yes, it’s about how people want to present, but it is also about how they want to relate sexually. “Trans” is its very own porn category as a result. At the same time, somebody who has transitioned reduces their choice of sexual partners, in many cases down to “chasers” and other trans people. How can a child understand any of these things?
They can’t. They don’t have the brain structures to understand the adult consequences of this kind of decision, or to weigh up options. How can a kid, who doesn’t even have sexual feelings, weigh up “you may never have an orgasm as an adult” when making a decision. They can’t. Children fail the “marshmallow test” with regularity. They are more impulsive and less logical than adults. They shout about computer games and throw tantrums because their peas are touching their mashed potatoes. They cry because they have to put their shoes on if they want to go to the park. They feed their sandwich to the dog, on purpose, and then cry because they don’t have a sandwich. Even teenagers are not capable of properly rational, adult decisions. My teenager is hugely sensible, gentle, lovely, thoughtful and a real steady presence - he’s got a kind of “space holding” energy that many adult men never achieve. He also has “teenage brain” and does things that are completely inexplicable, even to him, then looks at me confused, as if I can explain why he’s lovingly spread butter on his homework diary. He struggles to plan his evening, let alone his week. He has vague ideas about his long term future, but no ability to form or follow through on a concrete plan to get there.
To assume that children can understand the costs and benefits of social transition, puberty blockers, and cross sex hormones, and weigh up their options, is to assume that children are capable of adult understanding and adult decision making. It is to involve children in adult issues. It is to give children information that they are not capable of processing, and powers that they are not capable of appropriately wielding. It is to treat children like little adults, blurring necessary boundaries in the process. Worse, it is to blur boundaries around what children are capable of consenting to.
Victims of childhood sexual abuse often feel complicity in their own abuse - that we somehow consented to it. That complicity wasn’t something that was written on my skin, no matter how many showers I took to try to get it off me. It went through me like the writing in a stick of rock. But it is not my shame. Children cannot consent to sex. And they certainly cannot consent to the interventions associated with childhood medical transition. Childhood sexual abuse has lifelong implications, but these are less severe than those suffered by girls who have lost their femininity, their female reproductive organs, their breasts, with no hope of getting them back. Girls who are likely to lose their whole social circle if they detransition. And how much worse must their feeling of complicity be, when they welcomed these interventions with open arms?
One of my key moments in my recovery from childhood sexual abuse was the realisation that I was not capable of being complicit in what was done to me. I was a child, and children cannot consent to sex. I told my wife about “throwing myself” at adult men when I was a young teenager, and said that I felt complicit in them subsequently abusing me. She said, “what would you do if a young teenager, half dressed and half drunk, threw herself at you in a bar.” In that moment, I understood; it was not on me to avoid doing what abused children do. It was on the adult males I met not to reabuse me.
I feel similarly about those who have been transitioned as children. Whatever you think about adult transition (and I certainly have my views), children cannot understand or consent to this. It is impossible for a child to be “complicit” in their own sexual abuse - just as it is impossible for a child to be “complicit” in their own transition. These are victims, whether they spout the same rhetoric as their abusers or not. Whether, like Tatchell, they think that nine year olds can consent, or not. Unfortunately, even if they do detransition and seek out help, they will struggle to get it from doctors and therapists; the field is in the process of emptying of all but the most committed of affirmation ideologues.
So what are you arguing if you think children can consent to transition? You are arguing for the creation of technical adults, with childlike bodies and without sexual desire, who have not gone through puberty, but who can still, legally consent to sex. [7] If you can’t work out who would benefit from this, I don’t know what to tell you.
It doesn’t stop there. The category of the trans child has further boundary blurring and paedophile enabling elements. If you think that children can consent to transition, then that argument contains within it the idea that children can consent to sex. There is no logical argument that a teenage girl can give consent for an adult to remove her breasts, but not fondle them. There is no logical argument that a fifteen-year-old can consent to a hormonal treatment which causes irreversible vaginal atrophy, but not to having a penis penetrate her vagina for a few minutes.
Even the process of medical appointments for childhood transition feels abusive and intrusive to me. What parent wants a doctor to give their teenage child’s genitals a good old inspection every few months to make sure how well they’re growing? It reminds me of nothing so much as the fact that as soon as I hit puberty and started being “secretive” about my developing body, my father decided we were all going on nudist holidays. TRAs always bang on about it being us that want “genital inspections,” and being “obsessed with children’s genitals” (as my friend, Sarah Philimore was accused of being today). But as far as I can tell, those activities are ENTIRELY associated with the other side of the aisle.
The idea that children can “be” trans, that they are “born in the wrong body,” that they are “really” the opposite sex, that they have some sort of “gendered soul” that means only life long medicalisation can make them their “true selves” is about as regressive as you can get. It drives a coach and horses through safeguarding boundaries and through families. You can’t scrape the abusive icing off what would otherwise be a wholesome cake. Child abuse and the destruction of boundaries is baked in to the idea of the “trans child” from the very start.
[1] Cass Review – Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People
[2] NHS England: 'Gender-confusion in children may be a phase' - The Christian Institute
[3] What the Tavistock clinic’s closure means for the trans debate | The Week UK
[4] Do children grow out of gender dysphoria? - Transgender Trend
[5] Autism & Gender Identity – Autistic Minds - Transgender Trend
[6] Dr Az Hakeem says parents claimed their kids were trans at NHS Tavistock 'transing factory' clinic | Daily Mail Online
[7] Puberty is vital to the development of independent thought. The drive to separate from parents, to turn to one’s peers, and to develop one’s own identity out in the world, is at least in part driven by hormonal changes. There is no data available on the brain development of children who do not go through this process. Watching interviews with adults who were transitioned as children, there seems almost universally to be an over adherence to the parents’ narratives about who they are, that I would not expect to see in interviews with young adults.
Everything you say is absolutely right. I do want to make sure that you’re aware that a huge portion of parents are NOT onboard with this. Our teens have been indoctrinated into a cult-like belief system that we never saw coming. Are there things I would do differently if I could go back in time, knowing what I know now? Most definitely. Does that mean I am pushing for this out of homophobia, or to punish my child for being different? Never. I had a beautiful, clever, unique, creative, amazing little girl. She turned 14 and decided to throw herself away and become someone else, to live her life as a performance of a character she invented. To eliminate her authentic self. I could never be ok with that, and there are thousands and thousands of distraught parents just like me. We didn’t ask for this. But how can you control what a teenager thinks and feels? In 2 months she will be a legal adult and I will have even less control over her actions.