Teenagers, on top of everything else, are bombarded with confusing gender messages. I say enough

Where there’s a proven lack of data to suggest a medical intervention is safe, in this case, giving entirely healthy kids powerful drugs that halt natural development, it should cease. That was a key finding of the Cass Review of 2023, leading to the closing of the Tavistock and Portman Trust’s gender identity service, GIDS.

Another baffling conclusion from the Cass Review, however - one that’s caused disquiet among those alarmed by the gender-identity movement for years - was that a research trial should be set up to prove whether puberty blockers are as harmful as the evidence already suggests they are.

They provably block a natural stage of human development, affecting cognitive function, bone density, and much else besides. Nearly 100 per cent of children who take them go on to take irreversible cross-sex hormones.

Over 90 per cent of girls and 80 per cent of boys seen at GIDS were same-sex attracted. There was an explosion in referrals – from under 100 in 2009 to over 5000 in 2021, which strongly suggests an element of social contagion behind kids claiming to be the opposite sex. There are a growing number of young people who have ‘de-transitioned’, reporting severe, life-changing harms caused to them by going down the puberty blockers – cross-sex hormones – surgeries route advocated by gender-identity activists.

Numbers are difficult to quantify. Nobody bothered to follow-up on these young people’s experiences.

For these and many other reasons, the question of how any competent Health Secretary could plausibly argue a puberty blocker trial could be done ethically has been rumbling since Dr – now Baroness – Cass released her final report. Despite strong objections from critics, the Pathways Trial is, it appears, to go ahead. King’s College London will soon begin recruiting kids as young as 10 to take part. What we know so far is they’ll need to be of sound mind, somehow able to give informed consent, and have the consent of one parent.

How fun for couples who disagree on whether Timmy’s obsession with Elsa from Frozen is totally fine, or a sign of a burgeoning trans identity.

Let’s just cut to the chase: ‘gender incongruence’ is but the latest example of obfuscating language being deployed to muddy what’s going on here.

That many young people claiming a trans identity are suffering is not debatable. That this is true doesn’t negate the fact that a medical pathway for unhappiness, body-dysmorphia, and confusion is at the very least questionable.

I’ve particular empathy for teenagers who, on top of every other damn thing they have to deal with at that unenviable life-stage, have been bombarded with messages about ‘gender’ that adults around them struggle to understand and explain.

Nobody can seriously deny the fear there’s been in raising this issue. At the same time over a decade ago when the idea that ‘trans women are (literally) women, trans men are (literally) men’ was pushed relentlessly, we all got the memo questioning that was verboten.

It takes an extremely powerful movement to stymy parents, teachers, medics, and politicians from asserting the position, grounded in material reality and millennia of evolutionary knowledge, that human beings are mammals, either male or female, and sex is unchangeable.

It takes an entire culture to embed the idea that ‘gender’ is not a set of external tropes and expectations we as humans navigate, that change throughout time, and are often harmful (women as too ‘naturally’ thick to vote, people, come on), but a concrete ‘identity.’

This is the message to ‘gender incongruent’ teens: this ‘gender’ of yours is so important, you must not only embrace a new name or wardrobe. To have a successful ‘gender journey’ you must consider taking body-altering drugs, and maybe crowdfund for private surgeries. Adult genderists will strongly suggest you’ll be unhappy forever if you don’t. As if that’s not enough to contend with, a sizeable proportion of the population doesn’t share your interpretation of ‘gender.’ Even if your school has gone along with your name change, and your parents have too – possibly with fearful reluctance – you’re constantly aware of this threat of ‘misgendering’ from strangers. It happens a lot. The inside of other people’s skulls isn’t something any of us can control.

No matter what you do, such people are going to routinely upset you, often by accident, but sometimes by necessity due to insisting women are adult human females. Because they are, and women have rights on that basis. Adults who share your belief-system will tell you such people hate you, thinking you’ve no ‘right to exist.’

Enough.

‘Gender’ has become a contested word. But, for an attempt at clarity, here’s Germaine Greer: ‘Female is real, and it is sex; femininity is unreal and it is gender. And for that to become the given identity of ‘woman’ is a profoundly disabling notion.’

Genderism is an exceptionally compelling set of ideas that took most of us by surprise. I don’t wish to assign blame to adults I know struggle when watching their children imbibe its messages. I know many parents under severe pressure, particularly so as the ideology encourages cutting off any parent who doesn’t ‘affirm.’

But it is a belief system. It should never have been presented to children as fact. It took a helluva lot of adults to do that.

For Streeting to countenance putting even more children through an already discredited medical pathway, which we already know encourages young people towards lifelong reliance on dangerous drugs, all while de-transitioners lack any proper recognition and assistance, is absurd and heart-breaking. He should rethink immediately or prepare for backlash.