Read in context, Webberley’s “not everyone likes change” is not a wry comment on the human condition. It’s the words of the neoliberal boss justifying the shaving away of “inefficiencies” in favour of a “streamlined” service that brings in more money. It’s not about helping people to adapt to change, grow and thrive. It’s about repackaging rampant individualism as indicative of a more forward-thinking sensibility.

It’s one of many highly revealing moments in which Webberley lays bare the overlap between a worldview in which the only thing that matters is personal wealth, and one in which a child’s fear of puberty can, apparently, be cured with pills and patches. In both cases, actual human bodies — actual people, with their complex emotions, their identities formed and reformed in relation to others — are an inconvenience. Deny them. Get rid of them. If you can outsource the treatment of a gender-distressed child to a robot, removing what Webberley calls the “human interpretation of protocol”, you should do it. If people object, simply tell them that they hate progress.

This has been a highly effective strategy for transgender healthcare providers, not least because the hyper-capitalist messaging is masked by a fluffier interpretation of “progress”. If you can make people believe that anything associated with the body and its limitations is conservative and bad, then you are free to exploit the vulnerable. “Everybody’s vulnerable if they need something — so we’re not targeting a vulnerable population,” claims Webberley. Only you are if you do not see them as full human beings, but things to be rebuilt to make feelings go away — as if they were robots, too.

Webberley likes to suggest that those who object to what she is doing — prescribing poorly-evidenced treatments to tens of thousands of children across the globe — are anti-progress. “They don’t like trans people,” she says. I think people like her have existed in every age: quacks who capitalise on medical or technological progress before any of us have had time to catch up with and address the consequences.

In this case, the impact of online pornography — on adult males who want the world to endorse their fetishes, and on teenage girls who see womanhood defined by the porn script — has been tremendous. Suddenly, girls have new reasons not to want to grow up and lose themselves to someone else’s story. Real progress happens when we finally learn to value the bodies of humans before images on screens and/or in men’s heads.

It is amazing to me that, after Hannah Barnes’ Time To Think, after the Cass review, as more and more whistleblowers come forward, Helen Webberley seems so devoid of self-doubt. Yet part of me also reads her bizarre interview as a confession. She must known, mustn’t she, how bad it all sounds?

Or maybe she finds guilt, like employees, like the complex emotional lives of adolescents, just too messy. Perhaps she’s found a pill that can block out that necessary part of human existence, too.

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Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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