Parents warned - danger of transgender transitions
As the number of British children with gender dysphoria skyrockets, some doctors are backing away from the booming “transition” craze to express regret over the part they’ve played.
Last week, Britain’s Sky News revealed this and other facts about the growing phenomenon of children struggling with gender dysphoria in its short documentary titled Transgender Children: Crisis in Care.
Focusing on Britain’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London, Sky News revealed that 35 psychologists have left the children’s service in the past three years. Reporters contacted 20 of them, but only six agreed to speak about their work at GIDS, and only one would appear, voice altered, on television.
According to Sky News, all six of the psychologists were concerned about children being given hormones and, when looking back on their work at the Tavistock Centre, felt that they had not been able to adequately explore the psychological reasons for their patients’ discomfort with their naturally developing bodies. More than one of them said children with gender dysphoria have sometimes suffered previous trauma, including direct abuse.
“Therapy is not an option in this service,” one told Sky News.
Another said: “We fear that we have had front row seats to a medical scandal.”
Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull, also known as Posie Parker, is the U.K.’s most famous opponent of redefining the concept of female to include males. She hopes recent media attention to the controversy will bring an end to it.
“I am ever hopeful that increasing scrutiny of the practice of medically altering children who present as gender-confused will bring about an end to it. However we must not underestimate the power and pressure of pro trans lobby groups who wish to make access easier to both medicalized and surgical pathways.”
Sky News’s report said
- 77 children were referred to GIDS in 2009/10;
- 2,590 children in 2018/19
- 3,000 children on a waiting list
Girls have overtaken boys in requesting the service to an astonishing degree. In 2009/10, only 40 girls were referred; by 2017/18, that number had risen to 1,806, an increase of 4,500%.
According to one of Sky News’s sources, the sharp rise in female patients began in 2012. Perhaps significantly, all the children who spoke to Sky News were girls who identify, or formerly identified, as transgender boys.
One GIDS whistleblower told Sky News that he didn’t feel that he could even tell parents that their children weren’t transgender, for if he did, he would “immediately be called transphobic.”
Meanwhile, GIDS sees children as young as three.
- Half the children who arrive there are put on puberty-blockers to arrest their development.
- At 16, they are given cross-sex hormones,
- At 18 they can be given different surgeries, ranging from breast implants and mastectomies to the radical reshaping of their genitals.
Speaking for GIDS, Dr. Bernadette Wren told Sky News that the staff at the Tavistock
“fully inform children about the consequences of medical intervention in their teenage years.”However, it was clear from the children Sky News interviewed that they were much too young and confused to give informed consent.
- A 16-year-old girl calling herself Leo “came out” as a transgender boy at 11.
- She was was given the choice at 14 of harvesting her eggs.
- She balked at the idea of receiving the estrogen shots and invasive surgery necessary to do that.
“I could always adopt,” she concluded.
Another issue is that there are not enough psychologists at GIDS to cope with the high demand for appointments.
Currently, each staff member has a caseload of 120–130 patients, Sky News revealed, and there is a two-year waiting list.
One young woman on that waiting list is “Luke,” who says she came out as “trans” at the age of 14. Not willing to wait for the official channels to help her body align with her desired male sex, she “went private.” After a single telephone consultation that cost her £60 ($80 U.S.), she was given a prescription for testosterone cream.
Some children begin their “transition” with even less medical supervision. Sky News reported that children are finding cross-sex hormones for sale over the internet and “instructions” on how to “transition” on social media.
Finally, transgender activists have left many experts too frightened to speak. Sky News said many of the people who approached them to talk about gender dysphoria in children “wanted their identities protected for fear of criticism.”
Children must be vigorously protected.
“We must not allow politically motivated vested interest groups to herd vulnerable children into irreversible harm,” she said.
“It’s simply unfathomable that society has been manipulated to see this as anything but malignant, and qualified medics going along with this, even more incomprehensible,” she continued.
“I would warn any concerned parent to avoid consulting with GIDs until there has been a comprehensive independent review of the service.”
Meanwhile, young women who have sought to reverse the effects of medical and surgical interventions have warned against the influence of the internet. A “de-transitioning” Canadian woman named Dagny underscored this at a conference about gender theory and children in Vancouver this May.
“Like so many other trans teenagers, I first started courting my own trans identity because of two factors in my life: One, I had trans friends — two of them, both older than me, both female-to-male (FTM), like me, and two, I had a sharp increase in my social media use,” Dagny revealed.
“I was never very active on social media before I turned 15, but within months of creating an account on Tumblr and following several LGBTQ resource blogs, I had decided that I was non-binary.”
In the U.K., a young de-transitioning woman named Charlie Evans has launched a group called “The Detransition Advocacy Network” in order to help the hundreds of young people she says have reached out to her after experiencing regret after undergoing hormonal treatments and surgical procedures.
