Brunskell-Evans, Heather and Moore, Michele. Inventing Transgender Children and Young People. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
“Transgender and LGBT organisations such as Allsorts, Mermaids, Stonewall, the Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) and Gendered Intelligence in the UK are not child and youth support groups in any non-partisan sense, but activist organisations at the forefront of shaping public policy and government legislation,” Stephanie Davies-Arai charged in 2019. “The denial of biological sex is not a hidden ideological agenda” in the transgender ‘rights’ lobby, which has no resemblance to a ‘marginalized community’.
“They are heavily funded by government departments and lottery grants, and collectively they advise and provide training for the police, the Home Office, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Prison and Probation Service, along with the Department of Education, and the National Health Service, including its Gender Development Identity Service (GIDS).” All of this policy capture was leveraged against the children of Britain.
Reading in the rear-view mirror, the perverse policing of the current-day United Kingdom — two-tier justice, with social media speech investigated and punished while rape gang investigations languish — seems inevitable. Government by the most-offended is a bad system of power-distribution. Fear of trespassing the new speech and behavior codes of the activists has demolished safeguards and led to harm, as well as enormous damage awards in UK employment tribunals.
With ‘queer theory for kids’ effectively installed as official ‘education’ throughout the length and breadth of society, the demographics of transgender identification suddenly flipped. “Since children have been taught that every human being has an innate gender identity and it is this identity which defines the person as male or female, the boy/girl ratio has reversed, and girls now make up over 70% of referrals to the Tavistock clinic,” Davies-Arai notes. This ought to have been a clue in 2019 that something was wrong, a huge red flag, but instead the world was subject to an even greater intensity of activist gaslighting.
Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) and detransitioners are both mentioned in this book. Advocates of pediatric sex lobotomy deny the very existence of these phenomena. Inventing Transgender Children and Young People mentions the comorbidities of autism, trauma, and unrecognized or repressed same-sex attraction, all of which the activists have vociferously denied and which were later shown so starkly in the disclosures from Tavistock.
Also mental illness. “Recent studies of psychiatric and psychological comorbidities in transgender children presenting to courts or clinics attest to the higher than expected associations between psychopathology and gender dysphoria,” Diana T. Kenney writes in this anthology. No matter: for the activists, any child should be able to request sex lobotomy, no matter what else is wrong with them. As editor Heather Brunskell-Evans explains, “the alleged ‘middle-course’ is itself deeply politically positioned and ethically compromised,” a reality that ultimately shuttered the Tavistock GIDS.
Davies-Arai founded Transgender Trend, one of the first websites to criticize pediatric transition. She rubbishes the idea that social transition is harmless, or that affirmation is harmless. “Unquestioning affirmation is an approach wholly driven by activists; it is not — as it is presented — a neutral act of kindness and acceptance, it is the active psychological treatment of a child based on an assumption of outcome, and an active adult influence on the child towards that prescribed outcome.” And the intended outcome is political.
The myth that gender identity ideology is some kind of ‘youth movement’ is a key message of the transgender lobby and a flattering idea to young people themselves, who are characterised as being so much more accepting of diversity and difference. It is clear that this is a youth movement like no other before it: the authentic voice of a generation of young people which originates in the classroom at school and is learned from their teachers.
As volume editor Heather Brunskell-Evans observes, “inherent, pre-social gender identity is not a scientifically established fact but a disputed concept with a political history.” Pseudoscience turns official information into dangerous misinforation. “Despite a lack of neuro-scientific evidence for a sexed-brain, [Department of Health] guidelines tell parents the genitalia of a child and the brain can have ‘distinctly different characteristics’,” she writes.
A striking feature of this book is its use throughout of the word transgendering, a verb that functions as a noun, so that it imputes agency: clinicians are transgendering kids, teachers are transgendering kids, activists are transgendering kids. Brunskell-Evans writes that “the ideas originated by trans activists were imported into the GIDS by Domenico Di Ceglie and are now deeply embedded in the current practices and ethos of the GIDS,” a tradition that Polly Carmichael carried on after him.
He placed a core value on identity to be at the heart of the GIDS approach to children and young people, shifting the orientation of practice so that the first principle would be for clinicians to affirm the child’s self-expressed identity. The balance of power is thus shifted in the therapeutic relationship, away from the clinician’s authority and on to the child’s beliefs.
The children led, and led the Tavistock into disaster. Less than four years after Brunskell-Evans wrote those words, the GIDS was being closed down and journalist Hannah Barnes was explaining why in her book, Time to Think. Everything that critics of pediatric sex lobotomy woo had feared turned out to be horribly, nightmarishly true.
Clinicians darkly joked that “there would be no gay kids left” in Britain. Abuse trauma, autism, mental health issues, and plain old puberty fears were routinely ignored. In thousands of cases, the child was leading, and their magical, mystical, invisible, ineffable, gender identity was held paramount over any other concern. The results of activist endocrinology were predictable, and predicted in the pages of Inventing Transgender Children and Young People.
Roberto D’Angelo writes that the “technological paradigm” of the so-called ‘trans child’ has been one of its selling-points, but it has no scientific basis. “The child’s gender identity is conceptualised as existing a priori, as though it is an essential quality of the child that is beyond the reach of social and environmental influences,” he writes.
“How gender dysphoria may emerge in response to family dynamics, traumatic experiences such as emotional or sexual abuse, or social issues including how masculinity and femininity are constructed and regulated in our culture is not relevant to this formulation.” It is, after all, political and not medical or scientific. “Rather, gender identity is seen as a fixed, internal quality of the individual, or a fundamental core essence that reflects an essential truth about the child,” D’Angelo writes, quoting Diane Ehrensaft.
Ehrensaft is one of the most telling figures in the history of the invention of the ‘trans child’. Having made a name for herself in the early 1990s by supposedly helping two young girls ‘remember’ their experiences of satanic ritual abuse at the Presidio day care center, Ehrensaft graduated to helping children listen to their “gender angels” (her words) and ignore their “gender ghosts” (her words). This history is all the more revealing because when Ehrensaft issued her ridiculous report on the Presidio case, it had already been thoroughly debunked, the alleged sex dungeon tunnels dug up, and the lawsuits settled. Today, she is one of the most important clinical voices shaping the WPATH ‘standards of care’ for children.
“The past thirty years have been witness to the invention of two identities for the transgender child: the first is that of the unfortunate victim ‘born in the wrong body’,” Heather Brunskell-Evans writes. The first are those “whose gender self-identification requires medical diagnosis and hormone treatment (GIRES, Mermaids); the second is that of the revolutionary adolescent who bravely sensitises the older generation, including trained clinicians, to the subtleties, complexities and politics of gender (Gendered Intelligence).”
Exulansic calls these two approaches “Our Lady of Perpetual Hormone Therapy” and “the Church of the Nonbinaries.” Here at The Distance, we have recognized them as Gnostic and Hermetic esotericism. They are the two basic forms that psychological splitting can take. “This is a model of understanding which says that your true self is split off from your body and can exist in opposition to it, a model which not only validates and encourages body hatred and rejection but recasts this as heroic and brave,” Davies-Arai writes. This “mind/body split, or disassociation from the body, would, under any other circumstances, be recognised as a symptom of trauma.”
Instead, ‘affirmation’ promotes mystification of symptoms, causes, and solutions. In too many cases at GIDS, “the gender-affirming paradigm obscured the primary issues causing their distress and generated mystification rather than helping them connect to what was authentic,” Dr. Michael Biggs writes. He has since helped found SEGM, the Society for Ethics in Gender Medicine, because the activists in the field have no ethics. “My conclusion is that GIDS and their collaborators … have either ignored or suppressed negative evidence,” he concludes. “Therefore, GIDS had no justification for introducing the Dutch protocol as general policy in 2014.” It was fraud all the way down.
GIDS conducted a puberty blocker experiment that “showed predominantly negative outcomes” in 2015, Biggs explains. “After a year on triptorelin, children reported greater self-harm; girls also experienced more behavioural and emotional problems and expressed greater dissatisfaction with their body — so drugs exacerbated gender dysphoria. The fact that these outcomes have never been published is a serious indictment” of everyone involved in the experiment, including Di Ceglie and Carmichael, he writes.
We have seen this pattern repeatedly in transgender ‘medicine’. Far from the ‘settled science’ presented by activists, the evidence base for pediatric transition has been judged “low quality” by every systematic review, including the Cass Review. In one notorious case, Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy suppressed the results of a taxpayer-funded study of puberty blockers because she worried the scientific data would be “weaponized” to ban them. Since the publication of this book, WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which has the seal of Diane Ehrensaft’s approval, has also been caught suppressing study results that ought to raise alarms.
Meanwhile, extraordinary demands are laid on all of society to accommodate this new kind of child in the world. “Imposing the label ‘cis’ makes it clear that gender ideology requires the redefinition of everyone, including oneself, as a ‘gender identity’,” editor Susan Matthews and Stephanie Davies-Arai write. Activists are trying to change humanity itself.
‘Cisgender’ identity is revealed as a willingness to conform to sexist stereotypes. The transgender child is framed as the only one who does not conform, and being transgender becomes the only way of expressing non-conformity. What child approaching the teenage years would want to be in the boring conformity camp?
Leaving the cult of the trans child by contrast can be very difficult. “The detransitioners are finding that coming out as desisting is way harder than coming out as trans,” writes ‘Bob’, a pseudonymous clinician. “No carnivals, no government- and pharma-funded rah-rah groups, just a long hard look at yourself and negotiating the loss of people you thought were friends.” Detransition is treated as a kind of treason in the LGBTQAlphabetical ‘community’.
Robert Withers records the story of James Caspian at the University of Bath Spa, which turned down his research proposal on detransition for fear that activists would attack. “I suggest it is possible that those members of the trans community who are most active in silencing and denying the existence of detransitioners are attempting to police in others the doubts they cannot tolerate in themselves,” he writes. “If someone can bear to think about a thing, they can usually bear to let others talk about it, but if a person’s sense of identity is built around being trans, talking about doubts and regrets can be experienced as an existential threat,” requiring the banishment of the doubter.
This climate of fear activists create is matched by their own fearless appropriation. Nathan Hodson writes that “the idea of intersex has regularly been used by transsexuals in an attempt to offer a biological explanation for their gender identity.” False claims to have congential conditions known as DSDs (disorders or differences of sexual development) are indeed extremely common in ‘trans’ discourse. “There are a number of case studies of early transsexuals who claimed to be intersex in order to circumvent legal and ethical constraints which disallowed medical intervention on healthy bodies.”
As Hodson explains, this is no accident, for the transgender activists borrowed heavily from DSD advocacy in their rhetorical argument for the ‘trans child’. “The medical interventions challenged by intersex activists were … fundamental to the twentieth century invention of the transsexual.” Whereas the DSD advocates were arguing for children to be left alone, however, the gender activists were arguing for early intervention. At any rate, as Susan Matthews points out, GIDS ruled out any link between DSDs and its population of dysphoric young patients.
The only evidence ever offered for the ‘trans child’ is supposed self-knowledge, or gnosis. But this idea comes from adults like Julia Serano. “That ‘profound, inexplicable, intrinsic self-knowing’ described by Serano depends on a conceptual framework transmitted through books,” Matthews writes. The idea has an intellectual history, an academic historiography.
The first entry for ‘transgender’ in the MLA international bibliography is Susan Stryker’s 1994 essay ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’, a work which announces both the birth of the new academic discipline of transgender studies and the birth of a new gendered self: ‘Battered by heavy emotions, a little dazed, I felt the inner walls that protect me dissolve to leave me vulnerable to all that could harm me. I cried and abandoned myself to abject despair over what gender had done to me’ (Stryker, 1994, p.248). ‘In birthing my rage, my rage has rebirthed me’.
Being postmodernists, the academics who deconstructed the child, and erased the body of knowledge of human development in order to create the ‘trans child’, all cited Michel Foucault. “If we follow Foucault’s logic,” however, “it is not the reawakening of a buried gender freedom that we see in the explosion of gender texts but the production of discursively shaped gender identities.” We are seeing “the creation of a new system of knowledge, a system that is a form of discipline,” Matthews writes: You will welcome the trans child, or else. Politicians of the center-left, such as Nicola Sturgeon, have seen genderwoo as a means of party discipline.
“If there is a danger of misdiagnosing the gender non-conforming child, clearly every effort should be made to distinguish them from the truly gender dysphoric,” Stephanie Davies-Arai wrote in 2019. (Today, she might not even agree that children can be ‘truly’ gender dysphoric, as the idea of a ‘truly transgender’ child is contested.) “Apart from the fact that blanket ‘affirmation’ does not allow us to make any distinction at all, gender-affirmative groups in fact do the opposite, consistently conflating ‘gender non-conforming’ with ‘transgender’ as if they are the same thing.”
The idea of the ‘trans child’ was concretized by drawing in as many different children as possible. Autistic kids could be ‘trans’, mentally ill kids could be ‘trans’, gay and lesbian kids could be ‘trans’, abused kids could be ‘trans’, anyone could be trans, therefore everyone was allowed to be transgender, therefore everyone must play along at all times or risk social annihilation.
The people who did this were adults. They said they were letting the children lead, but this is also what Diane Ehrensaft believed when she projected her own mind on her subjects in 1991, during the satanic panic. The ‘trans child’ is a moral panic, too, but one that has activists organizing media, government, and the whole of society in its pursuit. In the UK, a group of clinicians and experts called this ‘trans child’ out as an “invention” in 2019. Disclosures since then have validated their thesis.
We were asked to believe that some children were ‘born in the wrong body.’ We were shown a lot of ‘science’ that, on closer examination, has turned out to be sorcery. As we have chronicled here at The Distance, the purveyors of pediatric sex lobotomy are changing their story. WPATH members no longer claim that children were ‘born in the wrong body’. They no longer appeal to society to ‘save the trans kids’. Instead, they talk about ‘embodiment goals’ and the magical ‘gender journey’ that may even end in detransition, who knows?
It was always fraud. It was always adult desires and adult issues and adult politics inscribed on the bodies of children. The ‘trans child’ did not exist until it was invented, marketed, and sold to the world. The results were not what anyone expected, but that did not matter, for the whole thing was supposed to be liberation. Now thousands of British children, and probably tens of thousands of American children, are permanently shackled to medical transition for the rest of their lives.
Scottish Women Shall Fight The English Civil Gender Wars Until They Win
Dalgety, Susan and Blackburn, Lucy Hunter, editors. The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht: Voices from the Front-Line of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights. Constable, 2024. (Amazon.com link)
This is a fascinating piece, which perfectly parallels in many instances my own re-introduction to activist talk on progressive sites at onset of COVID.
I remember particularly one aggressive trans who challenged me on DSD children and was entirely nonplussed when I said “like all children, they should have no surgical or other intervention unless there is a life-threatening physical reason.”
DSD communities have been clear, their members like all humans are male and female, and do not wish to have their genitals mutilated to suit the desires of parents or doctors.
You’d thought I had launched a nuclear weapon in a shopping mall.
Gender is a word used to hide sex.
Children always have challenges at puberty.
Trans adults have severe debilitating mental condition which induces them to compulsively lie and confabulate about human sexuality.
They should never be allowed to speak to children about sex without a parent present.