Is The Guardian finally coming to its senses?

While men get cancelled for sexual misconduct, women get cancelled for speaking their mind. Gender critical voices and radical feminists have been the avant-garde, fighting against trans ideology and the transing of children. For this, they have been protested, mobbed, fired, badgered, threatened, harassed, and even assaulted. There have been countless pieces about how voices against trans indoctrination are bigotted, and women who have wanted to speak out about this often have not.

Warnings about the potential for teen trans to be a social contagion, worries over the long term effects of cross-gender hormones and puberty blockers, were all shouted down by trans supporters who claimed that the risk of not transitioning was worse than any potential downfall of being fully gender affirmed. However, now that more people involved in trans services, from patients to clinicians, are starting to speak up, their voices and those of their supporters can no longer be silenced in the name of ideology.

Back in 2017, before trans women had periods, or won top prizes in women’s sporting competitions, before 11-year-old drag queens were a thing, clinicians at Tavistock Gender Identity Services (GIDS) in the UK wrote a letter to The Guardian “to alert them to serious concerns about what was going on within GIDS.” The Guardian declined to publish the letter and was in fact totally non-responsive.

The clinicians wanted to go on record saying that: “Trans’ can be used not as the compassionate realisation that some people need to take the always radical and courageous step to live their lives as though they had been born into the other sex role, but as a phoney panacea which seeks to shut down textured and nuanced discussion about these children and young people’s internal lives. If we can’t bear to hear the diversity within gender dysphoria then truly something has gone wrong—and believe me, it has.”

They were seeing an increase in referrals to GIDS, and felt an obligation to let the public know that, despite the “real, painful, and sometimes hellish” condition of gender dysphoria, treating healthy children with life-altering drugs and surgeries was not the best way forward. They believed that not all of these kids were having that experience and that GIDS could be doing more harm than good. The letter was not addressed by The Guardian, and in fact, in the two years since it was written, the trans agenda has gone even further off the rails.

Jamie Doward, who has written for The Guardian before on the problem of rapid gender transition for children, points out that “The number of children referred annually to GIDS has risen from 468 in 2013 to 2,519 in 2018.” That’s a huge increase. If clinicians and trans advocates are not looking at that number and wondering what the hell is going on, they’re not doing a very good job of supporting the kids who come through looking for help.

Gender critical feminists have been vocal about their view that trans adults are and should be free to live how they wish, though they have not acquiesced to opening women’s only spaces such as rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters to male-bodied persons. Many women have been effectively silenced, too afraid to speak out lest they lose work or friends, or court threats from trans ideologues who refuse to allow room for debate on the difference between biological sex and gender. Now several years into the practice of gender affirmation for children, some of those children who were given drugs, who have undergone body modification, are making their voices heard on this dangerous practice.

In The Times, Lucy Bannerman interviewed a young trans man who had been on puberty blockers since he was 12. The result was that, at 16, he had neither the physical characteristics of a girl his age or a boy his age. He was stuck in a permanent childhood. His bones were brittle and more prone to breaking, he felt that he was doing schoolwork of a 16-year-old with the mind of a 12-year-old. “Jacob found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on schoolwork. If sitting GSCEs is hard enough with raging hormones, it’s even harder without them, he said. “I’m someone with the developing mind of a 12-year-old who’s doing exams designed for a 16-year-old.”

It’s a horror that kids have had to go through these kinds of physical and mental traumas at the hands of clinicians and therapeutic personnel who were trying to help them. They’ve basically been treated as lab rats, thrown into experiments that no parent would have assented to for their kids if they’d known the risks.

If kids are listened to, their stories heard, and proper therapy offered instead of drugs and surgeries, they will have a better chance of figuring out how to make their place and find peace in the world. Those gender critical feminists who have not stopped speaking out may finally begin to see the fruits of the efforts. Hopefully, this will be in the form of true acceptance of kids who do not fit gender stereotypes, instead of trying to force them into the nearest gendered box.