Now Wes Streeting knows what it’s like to be a certain kind of woman. I jest, but not much. Since the Health Secretary announced he is going to maintain the ban on puberty blockers that Victoria Atkins brought in, he has received levels of hysterical vitriol to which women like me have become inured.
His motive is to protect children from the irreversible effects of these drugs, which may include infertility, anorgasmia, osteoporosis and an impact on brain development. His great crime is to look at the available evidence and err on the side of caution. The known harms outweigh the benefits of this experimental treatment.
Immediately after Streeting announced this, he was accused of having blood on his hands. A lot of incorrect statistics were bandied around about the suicides of teenagers who have been said to kill themselves because of a lack of access to puberty blockers.
Is it any surprise that those who cheer on the sterilisation and mutilation of young female bodies (for that is mostly what we are talking about, this huge spike in adolescent girls identifying as trans) are also happy to use these figures to fuel social contagion, therefore ignoring all the guidelines on how we talk about suicide?
The conspiracy theory is that the NHS are covering up some exponential rise in teen suicide. This is simply not true.
The evidence that puberty blockers in themselves do harm has been there for a long time, which is why the NHS stopped their use. In the majority of cases, they lead to cross-sex hormones – designed to feminise or masculinise the body – being prescribed too, which means that no puberty occurs. For boys, this means there is not enough penile tissue to make a functioning neo-vagina. For girls, it means infertility and the irreversible effects of testosterone (deep voice, facial hair, balding). This is not a “pause”, it is a life-altering decision.
Is it really any wonder that a load of middle-aged feminists rallied to the cause of trying to protect both single-sex spaces and teenage girls? That we well understand how difficult it is to grow up in a porn-saturated world where the selfie is more valued than actual selfhood? Most gay women I know say they definitely would have preferred to be boys at a certain stage of their lives, but that they came to terms with their sexual orientation and indeed have derived enormous pleasure from it.
The value of pleasure is deeply undervalued in all this. If pleasure can only be derived from idealised and fantasy bodies, then none of us would ever feel it. Yet, those who are still pushing puberty blockers are only interested in narratives of unhappiness and approved self-harm. Children will die if they are not given drugs to change their bodies into an unobtainable fantasy body!
Notable figures such as the fox-killing tax lawyer Jolyon Maugham and my former “colleague” Owen Jones – as well as some delusional Labour MPs (Lewis, Whittome, Creasy, Sultana among them) – seem unable to look at the actual facts because they are invested in a belief system that needs the “trans child” to justify all sorts of misogynist ideas about trans adults.
What we have seen over the last decade is that middle-aged men, who choose to identify as women, really have little to do with confused teenage girls, as Bev Jackson of the LGB alliance pointed out. Adults may change their bodies as they desire, children may not – and this is basic safeguarding, seemingly abandoned by the Left.
The ridiculous contention that puberty blockers are given to “cis” children so they are fine to use is not sustainable either. When blockers are given for precocious puberty – and this is being done less and less because of the risks, it is usually between the ages of six and nine, to slow down the process so they go through puberty at a more normal time. For “trans” kids they are given between the age of 10 and 16 so no puberty occurs. This is abuse.
There is both financial and personal skin in the game with all this. The Lib Dems take money from the company that makes blockers (Ferring Pharmaceuticals). A Green Party member who ran to be a councillor this year formerly worked for GenderGP, which sells blockers privately from Singapore.
Financial investment is one thing but emotional investment in this fiasco is hard to reverse. As many who mean well intone “trans rights are human rights”, they cannot admit they are ever wrong or that what we know from Cass about “gender-affirming care” is shocking.
In 2021, the prestigious Karolinksa University Hospital in Stockholm stopped blockers because it had a dozen cases of girls with osteopenia [reduced bone density], even spinal fractures, as the drugs have been shown to delay bone maturation. Was this done out of transphobia? Really?
I am not holding my breath for any acknowledgement that all the women who put their jobs on the line because of our concerns knew what we were talking about. We were told we did not care about gender non-conforming children – on the contrary: we cared enough to fight this insidious medical experiment.
Where have you been Labour? Incurious and incorrect mostly. Now that you are taking a stand, the deluge of abuse begins, you may one day consider how you became indoctrinated or you may rewrite history. Once the arguments about trans kids fall, the whole damn house of cards begins to collapse.
But among the rubble, don’t forget those of us who have kept the receipts still know exactly where they are.
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