The grisly truth about kids transitioning

Trans activists claim that access to ‘gender-affirming care’ is a basic human right. Even children, they say, must be free to medically ‘transition’. What this really means is providing children with powerful, sterilising drugs, followed by a lifetime of hormone treatment and irreversible surgery. And as we now know, following the landmark Cass Review into gender medicine, these children tend to be deeply vulnerable – often struggling with their sexuality, sometimes autistic or suffering from trauma – and most would grow out of their ‘gender distress’, if we allowed them to. Why have so many young, vulnerable children been lured – sometimes pushed – down this path? And why have so many supposed progressives become cheerleaders for such damaging and unnecessary medical interventions?

Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, recently sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to discuss the regressive truth about trans ideology. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full video of the interview here.

Fraser Myers: What consequences might children face if they medically transition?

Helen Joyce: There are some very real dangers for young children who are dissociating from their bodies. Going through puberty is distressing enough as it is, but it’s doubly distressing for children who dissociate from their bodies in this way. This might mean they’re not able to understand what their bodies are telling them or whether they’re attracted to certain people. If they receive hormone therapy as well, the consequences are catastrophic.

This is true for both sexes, but more so for girls. Quite simply, testosterone is a hell of a drug. It does a whole load of things to the body that are irreversible. I could grow a beard if I took testosterone. However, if a man took oestrogen, it wouldn’t make his beard stop growing. For something like hair follicles, once they have been switched on, that’s it. You can’t switch them off.

The same goes for your voice dropping. If I took testosterone, my voice would drop and I would never be able to get it higher again. These girls who are taking testosterone at 16 – which is the youngest you can get it on the NHS in England – will have facial hair within a year. They’ll have body hair, their voices will have broken. If they have the gene for male-pattern baldness, that will possibly have started, too. These are irreversible hormonal changes.

Testosterone is also terrible for female sex organs. It causes the vaginal lining and uterus to atrophy. Women who are on testosterone for more than a few years are eventually going to have to get their sex organs removed – which means they will be sterilised. However, oestrogen doesn’t really undo the things that testosterone does. Cross-sex hormones do far more damage to girls’ bodies than they do to boys.

There is a push to try to start male transition earlier or to block their puberty so they never go through testosterone-driven changes. But people are now realising that all of these interventions are very bad for a developing person. Taking what are euphemistically called ‘puberty blockers’ affects a child’s bones, brain and sexual organs irreversibly. It also affects future fertility and sex drive. If you stop all the natural processes that are supposed to mature a person during puberty, it will be disastrous.

Myers: Does this particularly affect young boys and girls who would normally grow up to be gay?

Joyce: Of course it does. How are you meant to know whether you’re gay or straight if you block puberty? By definition, gay people are more gender-nonconforming. This is because being attracted to someone of the same sex is gender-nonconforming. Research shows that people who are very notably gender-nonconforming in early youth often grow up to be gay. Of course, it’s more nuanced than that, because there are lots of little boys who want to play with dolls and are straight. But statistically speaking, if you’re very gender-nonconforming pre-puberty, you’re something like 20-times more likely to grow up gay.

These boys are now the people who are being told they’re probably girls. I think this is kind of a modern gay conversion therapy. They’re turning proto-gay boys into sterile facsimiles of straight girls.

Myers: Given all the risks that this ideology seems to pose, why is it that so many supposedly sensible people have fallen for it and have allowed it to run amok in our institutions?

Joyce: I call this the ‘ideology of bad analogies’. It has a lot to do with this idea of the arc of progress. People think that because we’ve ended slavery, we gave women the vote and we stopped tormenting gay people, that the trans issue must be the next civil-rights battle.

If you look at it out of the corner of your eye, that’s what it looks like. You might hear about trans rights and think about the hard road that somebody who identifies as trans has to walk. If you don’t stop and really think about whether we should count men as women, or women as men, most people won’t see why this might be an issue.

It’s also a strange-bedfellows problem. In America especially, it’s seen as a Democrat vs Republican issue. A lot of people just assume that anything supported by the Democrats must be on the side of human rights and progress and that Republicans are backward. If you’re gender critical, people just pigeonhole you or write you off before they think everything through. They’re not listening to you.

The other week, I was talking to somebody at the Liberal Democrat party conference. She said that she was absolutely not gender critical and, as far as she was concerned, transwomen are women. ‘But I worry about the children’, she said. I didn’t say anything at the time, because there was no point in getting into an argument with a random bystander. But that does make you gender critical, actually. That makes you a TERF.

All I care about is people not being hurt. I care about people’s rights and I care about the children. If you say you care about the children, you are gender critical – the ridiculous phrase that has become attached to people who notice there are two sexes. But if you then say that somewhere, you will get attacked. My colleague Maya Forstater, who founded Sex Matters, lost her job for saying this. People know that if they say something, they will get into trouble. So they stay quiet instead.

So much of this is just utterly ridiculous. We are in a situation where you can have ‘genderfluid’ dachshunds and enormous men pretending to be women in sports. In many ways, of course, I don’t know how somebody could not laugh. You just wouldn’t think it could be happening. But that’s part of how it has happened. People think it just all sounds so ridiculous that you must be exaggerating. That’s their mistake. It is happening and we have to take it seriously.

Helen Joyce was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch to the full conversation here: