Hadley Freeman in the Times:
These questions about why so many teenage girls suddenly didn’t want to be female, to the point that they eventually outnumbered the boys at Gids by six to one, and why this didn’t give pause to anyone in charge at Gids (the clinicians there who dared to question it were silenced and even pushed out) are at the heart of the final report from the senior paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass on the NHS’s treatment of gender-confused young people, which was published last week. And yet some still don’t get it. A leader in The Guardian on Friday said the Cass review had made “a connection between the rise in girls experiencing a mental health crisis and the rise of girls developing gender-related distress. Such an assumption lays Dr Cass open to the charge that her suggestions are tantamount to talking people out of their desired gender change.”
That “people” is telling: for too long, too many have argued that enabling children to change their body is part of the wider drive for acceptance of trans adults. But the two things are very different. A teenage girl who suddenly fears becoming a woman has nothing to do with, say, a middle-aged male who decides to live as a woman. Yet activists have energetically pushed the line that all gender-confused people should be seen as analogous, just as they say trans people should be seen as akin to gay people, and therefore any questions about why a teenage girl might not want to be female are as verboten as asking a gay man why he doesn’t fancy women.
That Guardian comment is in effect the trans "conversion therapy" line: that troubled young girls, terrified of puberty and hot off the social media treadmill, should be believed when they say they were born in the wrong body and demand to change sex, and any opposition, or mutterings about "maybe we should talk about this", should be made illegal. It's terrifyingly bonkers, and of course grotesquely irresponsible in our duty of care to these youngsters.
Teenage girls have always expressed unhappiness through their body, and feared becoming women. Some starve themselves (generally starting at 12 to 16), shrinking their breasts and stopping their periods. Some cut themselves. And, increasingly, some insist they are a boy. Gids’s largest patient group? Girls aged — yup — 12 to 16. In my 2023 book about anorexia, Good Girls, one former Gids psychologist described gender dysphoria in teenage girls as “the new anorexia”.
As Cass says in her report, there is huge concern about teenage girls’ mental health, with rising rates of eating disorders and self-harm. Yet because gender activists have argued that gender is special and should be ringfenced from questions, apparently no one with any power in the NHS suggested that maybe the thousands of girls suddenly saying they were boys might be a mental health problem, rather than a progressive triumph....
No child and certainly no teenage girl should be told they were born in the wrong body, any more than they should be told that losing weight or having bigger breasts would make them happier. The only way to get girls through the physical discomfort of puberty is not to block it but to reassure them — repeatedly — that there isn’t one way to look, have sex and live as a woman, but many; and their body isn’t who they are, but it is what they are — female — and that will never change. Their feelings about it will, though, and one day they will see their body not as the enemy, but as a miracle.
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