The media fuss over trans kids has reached both Parliament, with the Jurassic wing of the Tory party calling for a ban on talking to children about trans issues, and the BBC. Susie Green of Mermaids was on Newsnight last night to discuss the issue. Sadly she didn’t manage to have sensible conversation because she was put on with a TERF who seemed determined to set a new record for the number of untruths uttered in a single interview.
The TERF woman they had on was the same person who, at the Westminster meeting in September, stood up and accused Gendered Intelligence of going into schools and persuading children to become trans, despite the fact that Jay Stewart had just said that GI’s philosophy was to let children find their own path.
On Newsnight she once again came out with the claim that children were being “sterilized”. Standard NHS practice is not to provide cross-sex hormones until the patients are at least 16. Surgery is not permitted until the patient is 18. No medicines are provided until the child is obviously starting puberty.
Much hand-wringing is currently happening over the effects of puberty blockers. These are reversible, in that if you come off them puberty proceeds as normal. We don’t have lifetime studies of people who take these yet, though Susie’s daughter is a happy adult woman now. What never gets mentioned in such discussions is that these medicines were not developed for treating trans kids, they were developed for treating what the medical professional called “precocious puberty”; that is when kids start to go through puberty at a very young age. No one complains about safety in those cases. It is only when they are prescribed to trans kids that we get this panic.
The other massive whopper that the TERF came out with is that 80% of children who are diagnosed as trans later regret it and transition back. This again is completely untrue. The TERFs are always wringing their hands about how kids might be incorrectly diagnosed as trans, but when faced with evidence that the vast majority of kids referred to clinics are diagnosed as not trans they insist on labeling all of these kids as “regretters”.
Clearly there will be a grey area in the case of kids who will grow up to be happily non-binary and don’t need medical intervention, but clinics are becoming better with time at identifying who needs what treatment. By far the best diagnostic yardstick is what the child says about their gender. Those are also the kids who insist on transitioning fully at a young age. The others tend to be happy going to school in the gender they were assigned at birth, though they’d doubtless be even happier if schools were less gender-obsessed.
Then there was the claim that chromosomes are the ultimate indicator of “sex” and that “sex” cannot be changed. This again is scientific nonsense. There are plenty of people who were assigned female at birth and are living happily as women despite having Y chromosomes. Sex is as much a social construct as gender. There are specific physical attributes that are commonly associated with sex, but many of those can be changed, and their absence is not proof of gender. For example, women who cannot give birth do not suddenly become men.
These days some TERFs have taken to saying that they are not opposed to “genuine” trans people. The woman on Newsnight said this, though it was by no means clear what she meant by it. In any case, you can’t be in favor of “genuine” trans people if you insist that treatment should be denied to all trans kids, regardless of how strongly they identify. They know as well as we do that withholding treatment leads to suicides.
Then there is the hand-wringing that goes on about why can’t we just let children dress and behave how they want without “forcing” them to transition. Well we do. That’s the whole point. The trouble is that if the kid absolutely insists that their gender is other than that assigned at birth then the TERFs insist on forcing them to behave in the stereotyped way associated with their birth gender in order to “cure” them of being trans.
Which brings us to this whole conversion therapy thing. We keep getting told how impressionable children are, and that if we talk to them honestly about issues of sexuality and gender then that will somehow cause kids to become gay or trans. If that was true, then surely the decades we have had of people trying to cure kids of being gay or trans would have shown lots of success stories. In practice conversion therapy normally ends in failure or in the suicide of the patient. It is widely regarded as dangerous in the case of LGB people. Yet the likes of Helen Lewis, Sarah Ditum and Julie Bindel still promote it for trans kids. The only other enthusiastic supporter of the technique I can think of right now is Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate. One of these days I hope that the TERFs will think long and hard about the company they keep.