‘Trans’ kids really do deserve better

In a protest that’s been ongoing for six days now, 14 members of a group called Trans Kids Deserve Better (TKDB) have been camped outside the Department for Education (DfE). They are everything the stereotypical teenage activist should be: passionate, melodramatic and spectacularly misguided.

According to TKDB’s (curiously well-crafted) media release, the protesting teens are demanding the ‘right to a safe and inclusive education, as well as the overall rights of trans youth and adults’. This is not the TKDB’s first action. In June, it staged a three-day occupation / slumber party at NHS England’s offices, to protest against the ban on puberty blockers. During both events, the kids kept busy by making cardboard coffins to symbolise the non-existent epidemic of dead trans youth, and by putting on drag performances.

The police have treated the TKDB protests with the same kid gloves they reserve for climate activists. One activist told the What the Trans?! podcast that after members jumped over the railings outside the DfE, the police ‘aggressively’ asked ‘how we’re doing’. The horror! ‘Obviously I don’t like speaking to the pigs so I just did a thumbs up’, said the teen, adding, ‘they left us alone after’. At present, the group remains unhindered by arrests.

Kids who are struggling with their identities certainly do deserve better. They deserve to be told the truth, to be reassured that confusion during adolescence is normal. That many young people have a period of hating their bodies. And that taking experimental drugs to escape this process is dangerous and will ultimately be ineffective in resolving their distress.

Yet listening to TKDB members’ demands and hyperbolic statements it is clear they have been lied to, that they’ve been played. These teenagers have been whipped up by unscrupulous adults. They have been warned that their lives are at risk from a transphobic state, and that they are victims.

This is clear from their own words. In the same What the Trans?! podcast, one protester claimed that ‘a lot of people have died on waiting lists’. The myth that the ban on puberty blockers has increased the suicide rate has been debunked multiple times, not least by Professor Appleby who was commissioned by the DfE to scrutinise the claim. Yet, to date the politicians and public figures who have repeated this irresponsible claim have not been held to account.

Another TKDB member confidently stated that what was happening in schools was a ‘redo of Section 28’, a disingenuous reference to the nasty Thatcher-era legislation that tried to ban local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’. The young activist said that the government was ‘trying to censor our identities and who we are and it’s not right because we trans kids are everywhere’. Yet, as the teen herself explained, they had only learned about their supposed ‘identities’ online. In other words, kids troubled by the questions adolescence brings, are turning online for answers and are being told they are ‘trans’, largely by adults.

The TKDB campaign has now begun to attract support from lobbyists with skin in the gender game. After a plea on social media, the kids have been graced with visits from famous trans activists. This includes Susie Green, who resigned from pro-trans charity Mermaids amid a Charity Commission investigation into its safeguarding policies. Green has since co-founded something called Anne’s Health, which flogs puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. It’s fair to say being seen to support the kids was good publicity for Green’s new venture.

As with any fashionable cause, TKDB also has an online begging bowl. So far it has attracted over £13,000 from nearly 500 donors, presumably all adults who really ought to know better.

TKDB is merely doing what privileged British teenagers have long done: playing at rebellion and throwing themselves into a pointless cause. Whether they should be quietly indulged or disciplined for their method of protest is a matter for the police. But there should be no let-up for the disgraceful adults who have lied to them, using them as a front for their own ideological crusade and as consumers for a burgeoning medical industry.

The kids are not alright. Those who identify as trans really do deserve better.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.