October 25, 2022 - 3:30pm
It wouldn’t have happened even a couple of years ago. Until very recently, most of our institutions appeared to have been captured by an extreme ideology that insisted on the existence of something called a ‘trans child’. Now, in a welcome return to common sense, the NHS has acknowledged that this approach has scant clinical basis.
A report from NHS England says that most children who think they’re transgender are going through a ‘transient phase’ and will grow out of it. It recommends a ‘watchful approach’, rather than rushing into medical treatment, and suggests that doctors should consider the possibility of autism and other mental health conditions.
This is so obviously right that it’s hard to believe anyone ever thought otherwise. At the age of seven, I desperately wanted to be a cowboy, something that earned me the label ‘tomboy’. My parents responded by buying me a cowboy hat, but these days trans activists would advise them to change my pronouns and seek treatment for ‘gender dysphoria’. I grew out of it, but now there is an industry pushing the notion that a child who rejects gender stereotypes needs ‘treatment’.
The dire effects are visible in the heart-breaking testimonies of detransitioners, who bitterly regret embarking on irreversible courses of drugs when they were too young to understand the likely outcome. Teenage girls have been encouraged to bind their breasts or take puberty blockers, supposedly a loving, ‘affirmative’ approach to something that for most children isn’t actually an illness. A small number may be diagnosed with gender dysphoria but even then there are serious questions about this course of action. We don’t ‘affirm’ teenagers who present with anorexia, telling them they’re right to starve themselves, yet some parents have encouraged their kids to believe they were ‘born in the wrong body’.
We are our bodies. We may not like them, especially in the hormonally tumultuous teenage years, and we may reject conventional notions of masculinity and femininity. But the likelihood of contagion, of confused teenagers seeking each other out and getting advice via proselytising organisations like Mermaids — now under investigation by the Charity Commission for allegedly sending out binders against parents’ wishes — is painfully obvious. It could explain the huge rise in referrals to the NHS gender identity service, from fewer than 250 in 2011-12 to more than 5,000 last year.
There is also a risk that parents who can’t cope with a gay or lesbian child might decide that their son or daughter is trans. That, I suspect, is where the idea of the ‘trans child’ came from, reflecting the possibly unconscious wishes of the parents. It’s a thoroughly ideological invention, vital to the arguments of trans activists who misuse suicide statistics to scare families into going along with it. Not to mention schools, where children are being coerced into calling boys ‘she’ and using ‘gender neutral’ toilets.
Now we have official advice confirming that ‘trans’, in the context of children who question their sex, most likely means ‘transient’. The fact that so many kids have been encouraged into social and even medical transition is fast turning into one of the major scandals of the 21st century.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.
polblonde
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeExcellent news. Not before time. Let us hope an outbreak of common sense also occurs in Sports Bodies so we don’t have to witness the spectacle of large male bodied “women” carrying off all the prizes set aside for women’s sport.
And now we’ll need to set aside tens (hundreds?) of millions in compensation for those kids who have been groomed, misled and mutilated by Tavistock, as NHS management funded and complied with the abuse.
Someone needs to inform Joe Biden, who recently said in an interview with a trans activist that he doesn’t think that “any state or anybody has the right” to ban gender-affirming health care. “I just think it’s wrong.”
The Babylon Bee reported it as “Man pretending to be a Woman meets Man pretending to be a President”!
Would we all be better off if we stopped pretending that “trans” is in the same ojectively verifiable category as “human being”, “man”, “woman”, “tree” etc.? Transgender is a subjective state of mind, an opinion about the self which may or may not continue throughout life. “I am a trans woman” simply means I am a man whpo wants to dress and behave in a stereotypically female fashion. Most of us would say: “Go ahead, it’s a free country. But you don’t get any additional privileges because of your preferences.”
It will be interesting to see if this change by the NHS will have any consequences further afield: not a million miles away, a teacher has been jailed for refusing to go along with the social transition of a student.
https://www.thejournal.ie/enoch-burke-remain-in-prison-5866454-Sep2022/
The Scottish government have completely rejected the new guidence.
That’s not actually what Enoch Burke was jailed for. He was jailed for defying an injunction prohibiting him from being on the premises of the school which had suspended him for refusing to acquiesce in the student’s social transition. Although I support his and, I assume, your stance, nevertheless we should describe things accurately.
Yeah he was escalating the situation to get attention. Not a bad tactic, as the eco loonies have demonstrated in the U.K. – criminal damage is apparently not prosecuted these days.
There is only a very short chain of events that connects the aforementioned teacher’s refusal to acquiesce in the social transition of the student, to his jailing. But yes, to be fair, this short chain of events does involve the apparent violation of a court order.
Still, the new NHS guidance suggests that great caution around social transition of minors is warranted, and that schools need to respect teachers who follow this same cautious line.
When the student demanded to be referred to as “they,” the teacher ought to have responded: Are there two of you?
The religious argument isn’t necessary and is a distraction, in my opinion.
It also should never have been necessary to assert that the immutability of sex in Homo sapiens is a belief which was how Maya Forstater managed to win our right to “believe “ this fact!
It occurred to me the first time I saw/read/heard this “they” trope, it” “might as well ” be describing one’s acknowledgment that one is dealing with a schizoid individual, or one with multiple personalities , and /or someone who has a bunch of invisible friends around him, protecting him, so “tread lightly”—either way it’s absurd.
I couldn’t believe what happened there social transition is now regarded as inadvisable by the NHS. I suspect a deeper anti-Christian bias as her case was funded by them.
Really good news. ….And thank goodness we also have organisations like ‘Sex Matters’ https://sex-matters.org/ and ‘Fair Play for Women’ https://fairplayforwomen.com/ fighting on this issue, too.
“There is also a risk that parents who can’t cope with a gay or lesbian child might decide that their son or daughter is trans. That, I suspect, is where the idea of the ‘trans child’ came from”
I’m afraid you lose me here. The epidemic of traumatized kids having their private parts sliced off or chemically shriveled is being caused by homophobic parents? Really?
Have you read PITT on Substack? Have you read 4thWaveNow?
It’s not an unreasonable suspicion. Some of the most homophobic countries in the world, eg. in the Middle East, have no problem with transgenderism. It serves to maintain and serve culturally valued traditional gender roles.
If you read those places where parents and detransitioning teens self report their experiences (like PITT or 4thWave), they don’t say this. What they say is “I was completely blindsided”, “She never showed any signs of gender dysphoria”, “I cut my parents off completely to immerse myself in Tumblr and TikTok”.
It’s not parents driving this. There are a handful of cheerleader parents pushing their sons to become drag stars on YouTube (Desmond’s parents should have been arrested for child abuse years ago), but they are the exception. In most cases, the parents are trying to hit the brakes not the gas.
I do agree, its definitely not parents driving it in general, but there have been instances of parents being more comfortable with the idea of a future transgender child, than a gay one – Susie Green of Mermaids being the most famous! But, I agree , its unlikely to be a significant driver overall
well hallluja!!!!! COMMON SENSE STILL LIVES! Thank The lord for solid on the ground thinking!! We must stop planting these houghts in our childrens minds, if it gets attention children will surely use it !!!!!!!. Our kids are generally very smart !!!! and will see this as a way of avoiding many things they do not like!! Please will someone explain to those who obviously have no common sense, just becasue it exsists sadly in a minority of people does not mean it is catching!!!!!!!!
Couldn’t agree more with this view, it all comes down to parenting or lack of, children are always experimenting that’s how they learn, boys see there mums putting on lipstick and want to try it and trying mums high heels doesn’t mean they want to be a girl, children have too much information at too young an age they cannot process it all, internet must bear same blame too, Schools overflowing with woke teachers, of course following guide lines, ramming ideologies down their throats and other wokes trying to neutralise everything, glad to see commonsense is just starting to prevail but it will up by an hill challenge to keep it going as too many woke minority groups are given high pllatforms to shout from .