The stories of detransitioners are the most dangerous for the gender-identity narrative

 The stories of detransitioners, which are the most dangerous for the gender-identity narrative, are also silenced. They find each other online: on Twitter, where they use the lizard emoji to signal their detrans status, or on the detrans subreddit (though as I write transactivists have taken it over by claiming that it was a hate forum). Seen from within gender-identity ideology, they are apostates. Some of the abuse I have seen heaped on them is truly shocking. They are accused of faking their stories to incite transphobia, or of being in the pay of the American evangelical Right. Or they are told that they screwed up, and should now shut up and stop causing trouble for ‘real’ trans people.

Irreversible Damage, a book about female detransitioners by journalist Abigail Shrier published in 2020, is the first time their stories have been widely heard. Shrier struggled to get the book published and advertised. The first publisher to consider buying it backed out after staff threatened a walk-out. Amazon refused to accept ads for it, and when a parents’ group started to crowdfund billboards advertising it, the crowdfunding platform pulled the plug after transactivists complained. (There is, however, clearly an appetite for a non-airbrushed take on paediatric transitioning. Shrier’s book has sold extremely well.)Many detransitioners find telling their story impossibly painful. It takes courage to speak truth that others do not want to hear – especially when you used to be one of those trying to shout the truth-tellers down. They often feel deep shame, says Lisa Marchiano, the Jungian therapist. Some I have spoken with recall with remorse their own attacks on people who spoke against paediatric transitioning. Others regret having encouraged others to transition when, with hindsight, they were all caught up in the same craze. Many feel like fools for being so sure they wanted something and then realising they were wrong.

Recovery requires them to forgive themselves. Just how hard that is depends in part on how far they went before desisting. Someone who took cross-sex hormones for a year or two may struggle to recover their footing in reality. But someone who regrets having their reproductive organs removed must process the worst sort of grief: that caused by an irreparable loss you eagerly brought upon yourself. Not only are they sterile, but they have lost body parts that matter for general health. A woman who has undergone hysterectomy is more likely to suffer a range of health problems, from heart disease to urinary incontinence. One without ovaries will have to take artificial oestrogen to stave off menopause. ‘Knowing you made a choice that really damaged your health, and you did it when you were barely twenty,’ says Marchiano: ‘that is a very difficult thing to come to terms with.’

Even as detransitioners and sceptical parents have to be sought out and befriended before they will tell their stories, gender-identity ideology’s most ardent adherents are given platforms everywhere. Susie Green, the chief executive of Mermaids, took her child to Thailand for sex-reassignment surgery at age sixteen – two years below the legal age in the UK. And yet Green is frequently asked to comment on stories with a trans angle. The careers of Jazz Jennings – and her parents – were launched in 2007, when Jazz was six and the family appeared in a documentary presented by Barbara Walters. The family have been on television ever since. Kai Shappley (the Texan child whose mother would not accept a gay son) is now an actor, and played a transgirl in the 2020 Netflix reboot of The Baby-Sitters Club.

This celebration of one group, and denigration and silencing of the other, surely has an impact on whether children seek to transition, and also on whether they eventually desist. Coming-out school assemblies, and teachers explaining how special and brave the trans child is, help lock children into trans identities they might otherwise have abandoned. (This is not to deny that trans children will face bullying. The two evils do not cancel out.)

When I spoke with Richard Green before his death, National Geographic had recently published an issue with transgender children on the cover. Green was certain that such publicity was a terrible idea. The ‘tremendous personal investment’ of both child and family in the trans identity would make desistance much harder, he said. The sceptical parents I have interviewed would love to be proved wrong; to see their transitioned child blossom. But parents who have turned their children into their public activism are all in. They can never allow themselves to entertain the possibility that setting their child on the path to trans adulthood might have been an error.

Child transition is an issue in an increasing number of divorce battles. Most do not come to public notice (I heard about the trend from medical professionals who have been called as expert witnesses). But in 2019 one was reported worldwide: that of a seven-year-old male child in Texas whose mother insisted she had a daughter named Luna, and father, that he had a son named James.

The case was a Rorschach test for America’s polarised media: which parent was the hero and which the villain depended on the politics of the outlet. The mother persuaded a court to grant her custody and order the father to dress the child in girl’s clothes and use female pronouns. Then the father gained joint custody, after providing evidence that the child showed no interest in presenting as a girl during custodial visits. The mother appealed, and won, and, at the time of going to press, the child is known as Luna, a girl whose father has no say in her care.

However this story plays out, its poisonous twists cannot be good for the child’s mental health or relationship with the warring parents. But it is cast in the shade by what happens in Canada, where gender-identity ideology is entrenched in law and the government grants itself sweeping powers to intrude on family life. There, parents may find that, set against their child’s, their opinions are irrelevant.

In 2013 the Jacksons (not their real name; a Canadian court order prohibits its publication) separated. Their daughter Max became distressed and depressed. In 2016, aged twelve, she was referred to the school counsellor. Unbeknownst to her parents at the time, she mentioned feeling a commonality with the transboy protagonist of a film she had seen online. The counsellor concluded that Max was trans, arranged for a change of name and pronouns in school records, and referred Max to a psychologist, who recommended testosterone and made a further referral to a paediatric endocrinologist.

A consent form was sent to the Jacksons; the father refused to sign. ‘I wasn’t even looking at the trans part of it,’ he says. What jumped out were the disclaimers: that this was an experimental treatment; that no one knew the long-term effects of taking cross-sex hormones so young; and that sterility was near-certain. He reasoned that his daughter could do as she chose when she reached eighteen. Until then, protecting her was his job.

But under British Columbia’s Infants Act, a child of any age has the right to medical treatment that is opposed by parents if the doctor thinks it is in the child’s best interests, and that the child is ‘mature enough’ to decide. In 2019, the supreme court of British Columbia ruled that Max could consent to medical transition independently of the father’s wishes (his ex-wife was no longer opposed). His refusal to refer to his child as a boy, and continued opposition to transition, were ruled ‘family violence’, and he was banned from speaking to the press. But after a period of silence he started to speak to media outlets, some of which named him and the doctors involved in the case. In March 2021 he was arrested, and a month later was sentenced to six months in prison for criminal contempt of court. ‘The initial bad actors are the teachers and school counsellors who secretly put young girls on the path to gender clinics,’ says Carey Linde, a lawyer who has represented the father in most of the hearings. ‘And then Canadian law allows doctors to provide experimental treatments without parents even knowing.’

You can judge how easy it is to find a doctor in Canada willing to certify that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are in a child’s best interests from the recording of an event at Vancouver Public Library in February 2019. In it, Wallace Wong, a child psychologist, can be heard saying that his paediatric gender clinic sees around five hundred children who are in public care. His caseload is around one thousand, he says, and his youngest client not yet three. He advises parents to accelerate children’s transition by exaggerating their gender dysphoria, and claiming that if transition is prevented, they will kill themselves. ‘Pull a stunt,’ he says. ‘Suicide, every time – they will give you what you need.’

*

The final harm to children I want to discuss concerns safeguarding. As the belief that biological sex is over-writeable by self-declared gender identity takes hold, institutions are abandoning the protocols set up to avoid a repeat of child-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts, residential homes, boarding schools and many other institutions. Guidelines written by trans lobby groups and adopted by schools, sporting federations, social clubs and so on mean that toilets, changing rooms and dormitories are now segregated according to the sex that children – and adults – say they are. Parents are left in the dark.

In 2018, Helen Watts was expelled from the UK Girl Guides for objecting to the organisation deciding to allow males to become members and group leaders, provided they identified as girls or women. The new rules say there is no need to inform girls or parents if males will be sharing sleeping accommodation or washing facilities. Watts wonders whether Girl Guides has considered the consequences for personal care (her questions have gone unanswered). ‘How would you, or your five-year-old, feel about her being cleaned up after a toileting accident by a male who identifies as a woman, and you’re not even supposed to know?’ she asks.

Watts also objects to leaders being told that conversations about gender identity can be confidential. ‘I understand the need for discretion and sensitivity,’ she says. ‘But that should apply just as much to the girls, whose interests Girl Guides is supposed to represent. Girl Guides is potentially putting teenage girls and boys in the same accommodation and not telling parents. All leaders have safeguarding training, and we learn never to agree to keep a secret. We’re keeping information from parents that might alter their decisions. It undermines trust, and builds a barrier between children and parents. It’s gaslighting on a massive scale.’

Such concerns have nothing to do with believing trans people are unusually likely to be predators. Safeguarding procedures need to cover everyone, no matter their gender identity. ‘I know of a Guide leader who had to bring her four-year-old son on a weekend camping trip, and there had to be rules for where he was to shower and sleep,’ says Watts. ‘Including male children along with female ones is a risk you have to assess and manage – unless they say the magic words, “I’m a girl.” ’

Child-safeguarding rules are largely about nipping problems in the bud and preventing honest mistakes. But they are also intended to prevent rare, catastrophic institutional failures. The history of institutional child-abuse has shown how predators can ‘groom’ people and organisations to accept behaviour that should have raised red flags. The only defence against such grooming is to apply child-safeguarding rules to everyone, always, with no exceptions, and to regard child safeguarding as an obligation of every adult. That is why I am writing the next few paragraphs, though I know from experience how ready people are to misinterpret and dismiss fears about harms to children as malicious mud-slinging.

Let me be clear: in what I am about to say there is an analogy, and it is not between transactivists and paedophiles, but between some transactivists and campaigners for gay rights post-1968 – who were naive, self-centred and blind to children’s welfare, and therefore easily manipulated by paedophiles. (The further reading section for this chapter lists copious sources for a claim that may seem inflammatory, but on which the historical record is crystal clear.) My point is that transactivism can be exploited by those who would harm children – not that trans people, or transactivists, want to harm children, or do not care if others do.In the late 1960s, some European liberals thought that breaking down sexual taboos was a task that had to be started young. In German kindergartens run along radical-left lines, teachers encouraged children to fondle them, view pornography and simulate sexual intercourse. Contemporaneous accounts show that parents often felt qualms, which they suppressed because of what they had been told about how children should naturally behave. What happened was child-abuse, though motivated by political conviction rather than sexual desire. But it did not take long before paedophiles saw their chance.

The leaders of the sexual revolution were men whose aims were to legalise homosexuality – and, in some cases, to smash the heterosexual family unit. Few if any wanted to endanger children; they simply did not give children enough thought. Left-wing organisations tolerated groups such as the UK’s Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which had links with the Labour Party and the civil-rights group now called Liberty. In Germany, a political organisation called the Study and Work Group on Paedophilia made remarkable advances. In 1980, a youth group affiliated with the liberal Free Democratic Party adopted pro-paedophilia positions, as did the Green Party, formed the same year.

Paedophiles gained such a hearing on the Left partly by persuading Leftists that their enemies’ enemies were automatically friends. In this case, the enemies were Conservatives, Catholics, evangelicals and fascists, all of whom opposed both gay activists and paedophiles. On the Left, that made speaking out about paedophile infiltration nearly impossible.

In 1979, Eileen Fairweather, a tyro journalist, was writing for Spare Rib, a feminist magazine. She was assigned to read the book Paedophilia: The Radical Case, which argued for lowering the age of consent to four. The author, Tom O’Carroll, was an early member of PIE who was later imprisoned for child-abuse. Fairweather recalls ‘anguished, earnest’ discussions about what to write. ‘I did draft something, arguing that the existing age of consent was not “patriarchal”, but protected children,’ she says. ‘But I never even dared show it to anyone.’ Paedophiles had so thoroughly infiltrated the gay movement by that time that if you dared criticise those calling for ‘child sexual liberation’ you were branded anti-gay. Fairweather says she sees ‘the same intimidation and paralysis of intelligence’ today, caused by the fear of being called transphobic.In the 1990s, Fairweather won press awards for her work uncovering paedophile rings in British children’s homes and schools. She became an acknowledged expert on how paedophiles exploit ‘institutional weaknesses and political correctness’. It is therefore concerning that gender-identity ideology raises red flags for her, in particular the advice to teachers to keep secrets from parents and discourage children from speaking up about concerns regarding sharing their private spaces with children of the opposite sex.

The worry is not, I repeat, that trans people are unusually likely to be child-abusers. Gay people aren’t, either, and yet their movement was infiltrated by those who were – with two baleful consequences. Children were harmed who could have been kept safe and, even today, homophobes conflate homosexuality and paedophilia. Anyone who cares for the welfare of either children or trans people should want to avoid history repeating itself.

Helen Joyce

Trans