Chapter 19: Specific Battlefronts: 3. The Transgender Conflict

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CONTENTS

PART 19.1 Introducing the Transgender Holocaust

Introduction

PART 19.2 The Nature of the Battle

Enter the Tavistock

PART 19.3 Clarifying the Perspective

The Reality of Gender

But Why?

Following the Story

The Costs

A Bizarre Example

The one-way street

Enter the Expert again

The Truth

Wise Advice

PART 19.1 Introducing the Transgender Holocaust

Gen 1:27 So God … created them;   male and female he created them.

Introduction: ‘Transgender', is all about “a mismatch between body and identity”, as one writer put it This ‘mismatch' is called Gender Dysphoria = the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity to be at variance with one's birth gender. The problem appears to have escalated because in the USA in particular (and elsewhere on the continent of Europe) a group of doctors, seeking to help those who wanted to change their sexual identities, started using hormones and surgeries to change outward sex. What was initially very rare, has become almost common and a key feature in gender-war conflicts.

As believers we might have thought that our starter verse says it all, it's how things are, but in the western world of latter decades this clarity has been thrown out the window before the worship of the great god, “feelings”. See a somewhat tongue-in-cheek quote:

Sounds bizarre but that's virtually where we've got to – until recently!

For this chapter we will use as our main resource ‘Trans – Where Ideology Meets Reality' by Helen Joyce, Editor of ‘The Economist' in Britain, published in 2021 (as well as Douglas Murray and quotes from the Times).

PART 19.2 The Nature of the Battle

Enter the Tavistock: Joyce points out that until fairly recently hardly any teenage girls sought treatment for gender dysphoria. She writes,

In 1989, when the Tavistock clinic opened there were only two referrals, both young boys. By 2020 there were 2,378 referrals, almost three-quarters of them girls and most of those teenagers.

The Times 26th March 2022 reveals a further stage of the conflict:

An NHS child psychiatrists' conference on gender dysphoria was cancelled after transgender rights activists accused speakers of “extremism”. A hundred trainee child psychiatrists were due to attend the event, organised by staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Northeast London NHS Foundation Trust. A number of high-profile speakers, including academics and charity representatives, had agreed to address trainee psychiatrists last Wednesday. But the event was cancelled at the last minute after some NHS staff complained it had been “captured by anti-trans ideologues”. The conference was due to discuss treatment for children identifying as transgender, after a damning report this month by Dr Hilary Cass into the gender identity development service at the NHS's Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Cass, a retired paediatrician who was due to speak at the event, said the clinic was “not a safe or viable option” for children and a “fundamentally different service model is needed”.

But the battle had been going on for some time. The Times, Nov 23rd 2021, wrote,

“Girls who do not like pink ribbons or playing with dolls are being treated as transgender at the NHS Tavistock clinic, according to a whistle-blower.”

The article continued,

Dr David Bell, who was a governor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, said that his former employer was acting as a “gateway for puberty blockers”, putting young people on a pathway to medical treatment…. Bell, who worked as a psychiatrist in adult services, retired after 24 years at the trust… In 2018 he was threatened with disciplinary action after accusing some colleagues of “fast-tracking” young people into life-altering decisions without a full assessment.

So called ‘puberty blockers' had been used for some time in the transgender industry, ostensibly to slow up or stop development of puberty but were found to actually encourage the development of transgender treatment.

The Times, March 10th, 2022,reported,

The Tavistock clinic faces a complete overhaul after a review found that its gender identity services are “not a safe or viable long-term option” for children and young people. …. The clinic, run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is England's only specialist service for children and young people who identify as transgender…. It has been overwhelmed by a sudden increase in referrals from across the country, particularly among young girls who are distressed about their gender and youngsters on the autism spectrum. In 2009 the clinic received about 50 referrals — typically from males who had suffered gender dysphoria from an early age. By 2020 there were 2,500 referrals, mostly from females who started suffering gender identity issues in their early teens, with a further 4,600 young people on the waiting list. About one third of children and young people referred to GIDS have autism or other types of neurodiversity, while there is also an over-representation of “looked after” children in local authority homes or foster care.

Subsequently The Times July 28th, 2022, reported

The NHS is shutting down its gender identity clinic for children after a review found that it failed vulnerable under-18s. The gender identity service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been ordered to close by next spring.

While, this point of time – late 2022, many are relieved by the shutting of this clinic, it appears clear that transgender ideology is alive and well in the |NHS who reported they will be setting up two separate clinics next year, hopefully under better controls.] Nevertheless transgender ideology continues as a social change force in society.

PART 19.3 Clarifying the Perspective

The Reality of Gender: Perhaps it would be helpful to identify biological gender and what we will call ‘social gender':

i) Biological Gender - being in accord with the genitalia and reproductive elements of the body that a person is born with – male or female.

ii) Social Gender - refers to the roles and identity that the person plays out.

This has only become difficult when the roles and identity are different from the biological gender.

But immediately some will say, but social gender is only a social construct, i.e. what particular communities expect of gender, but this is only true to an extent. What we expect a child to play with or what sort of clothes we expect them to wear is only a small part of the picture because at the end of the day, the end point crucial distinction is, can my body produce a child? If it can, I am female, if it can't I am male. Perhaps our concern should be more what is going on in the minds of our young people, and the education they are not receiving, that should teach them to think, reason, rationalise and use logic.

Now I have underlined the word ‘can' because there is a distinction between ability and desire. For the first few years of our marriage, my wife seriously didn't want children; she had the ability but not the desire. (We subsequently, very happily had three children).

But Why? In Chapter 16 we asked why is it that a number of young people wish to declare themselves as ‘gay'. Here we now need to ask a similar question, why have an increasing number of children or young people opted to identify as a different gender from that with which they were born and go through therapy, drugs and maybe even an operation to change them physically. We suggest:

1. Because the subject has been raised and it has been made ‘normal' to question your gender, and good-hearted but confused parents have failed their children. Joyce calls it ‘social contagion'.

2. Because, firstly in America and then elsewhere, in the medical world, doctors, therapists and surgeons were allowed free reign without checks, for reasons that, in the light of recent history, can only appear questionable.

3. Other more complex reasons suggested by Joyce, e.g. the failure of feminism to allow women to rise up, only being able to do so if they pretended to be a man!

In her book, in Chapter 6 subtitled ‘How gender identity ideology harms all children', she comments at one point about how many parents feel isolated, declaring,

“these parents say that their attempts to protect their children are actively frustrated by everyone else. It is now common for schools to accept children's announcements of new identity's without question, and even to change children's sex in school records without informing parents.

later she adds

“all this happens in a suffocating silence. Mainstream media outlets focus on the heart-warming narrative of children discovering their true identities, and supportive parents who accept that revelation. Parents who do not feel this way mostly do not want to go public, even if they can find a forum, in the in case it harms their relationship with their child.”

Following the Story: Without going into the complexities of this chapter, the very sub-title and that of the following chapter, “How gender-identity ideology erases women”, suggest a very murky and disturbing world of the activists.

The following chapter's sub-title, “Why female-only space matters so much to women”, followed by, “ How gender self-identification threatens to destroy women's sports”, take us onto more familiar ground for those who regularly read newspapers.

Chapter 10 we see subtitled, “The American Left embrace of gender self-identification”, reminds us of what we have seen before, that there is a distinct political undertone too much of the culture war.

Chapter 11's subtitle, “Transactivism's long march through the institutions,” is an uncomfortable record of how gender-identification ideology has seeped its way through society, and this is continued in the following chapter subtitled, “How trans activism is chipping away at civil society”.

Chapter 13 subtitled, “How British women are starting to fight back”, is a further sign of what we said at the beginning of the series, that there are signs of the tide turning. Her concluding chapter titled, “Trans rights are human rights”, remind us that all the while we are talking about human beings to be respected (see earlier). It is a powerful book, often unpleasant and uncomfortable reading, but highly revealing.

The Costs: What has become clear (and various academic and scientific writers have produced books down this same line) is that

a) after such surgery the person in question will never be able to have children,

b) they may need medication for the rest of their lives and

c) most importantly, a growing number of young people who were led by these doctors to have these operations, in their twenties deeply regret it and profoundly wish they had never let it happen.

A Bizarre Example: To see something of the awfulness of this in different parts of the world, we need to cite Douglas Murray again, where in his chapter simply titled, ‘Trans', he starts by giving an example of something that happened in Belgium: a girl who had been born a girl – no question there – but who, because of her strange family who rejected her, got so worked up that she wished she was a man and so, in 2009 in her late thirties, started taking hormone therapy and then went through a number of surgeries to change her outwardly into a male figure. ‘He' was so distressed by the end result that the government agreed to euthanize him and he was put to death in 2013 because of “unbearable psychological suffering.”

Murray comments on the bizarre nature of all of this: “the killing, like the operations that preceded it, was performed not in a spirit of malice or cruelty, but solely in the spirit of kindness.” And if you wonder why the transgender crusade has progressed and caused so much harm, it is (let's be generous and kind) because misguided (and you might want to add ‘godless') doctors and misguided parents thought it was kind to take children's feelings at face value at a particular point in their lives, as a determinant of the truth about that child and either led or let those children go down a ‘rabbit hole' that was to some of them, to hell on earth, listening to Murray's example above and Joyce's testimony above.

Enter the Expert again: Helen Joyce declares that the thing that finally pushed her to write the book was meeting a number of ‘detransitioners', (mainly young) people who took hormonal and sometimes surgical steps towards transition (to change their gender physically and emotionally), “only to realise they had made a catastrophic mistake”.

She continues later,

“Detransitioners speak of trauma from experimental drugs and surgery, of having been manipulated and deceived by adults, and being abandoned by friends when they detransitioned. I have seen them abused and defamed on social media, accused of being transphobes and liars and of trying to stop genuine trans people getting the treatments they need.”

The Truth:

1. A very small number of babies are born with mixed genitalia or reproductive organs. A few are.

2. A few children, without outside influence, genuinely seem to feel they are the opposite sex to that which their genitalia would suggest. Murray declares we do not know why.

3. A much larger (and increasing) number of children are confused about their gender and, for a variety of reasons, start talking about receiving treatment – hormone therapy followed by surgery.

4. A considerable number of children change their feelings about their gender as they mature.

5. The debate is clearly about identity and woke activists have often used this to cause mayhem.

Hold this last point. Joyce comments,

“Ideas have consequences, and one of the consequences of the idea of gender self-identification is that children are being manipulated and damaged. Once you have seen that, it is hard to look away. The detransitioners I know have suffered greatly.”

Wise Advice: Joyce commented that she would not permit her child to take drugs or alcohol that would harm them, no matter how much they implored me. She concluded with the wise comment about children worrying about gender mismatch, leave it until they are adults and then let them decide.

The evidence that Helen Joyce brings to us, as we noted previously, is that numbers of young people change their minds, change their feelings, given time, thus removing the need for treatment.

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