By Inga Berenson
Freedom of speech took another big hit in the United Kingdom last month. In response to a complaint filed by Susie Green, CEO of Mermaids, the Yorkshire police interrogated Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull because of some tweets she posted in 2016 and 2017. Known on Twitter as ThePosieParker, Ms. Keen-Minshull is a stay-at-home wife and mother of four.
Mermaids is a nonprofit organization based in the UK. According to its website, Mermaids “supports children and young people up to 20 years old who are gender diverse, and their families, and professionals involved in their care.”
The offending words
According to Ms. Keen-Minshull’s account, Ms. Green objected to a tweet stating that “the CEO of Mermaids took her 16-year-old to Thailand and got him castrated.”
For this tweet and others criticizing Mermaids for promoting pediatric transition, Ms. Keen-Minshull was “interviewed under caution” for 40 minutes on February 23, 2018. She now awaits the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision on whether she will be charged. According to Ms. Keen-Minshull, the potential charges against her are “nuisance, public order, malicious communications compounded with a potential hate crime.”
On the crowd-funder site she has set up to raise funds for her legal defense, Ms. Keen-Minshull writes, “This fight is not whether you agree with my views on [the] transgender issue as much as it is that you agree that I have a right to air my views, a right to voice an opinion, a right to free speech.”
Without question, Ms. Keen-Minshull’s tweets were strongly worded, but were they untrue?
Unmasking euphemisms
It is not disputed that eight years ago Ms. Green took her 16-year-old child to Thailand to receive gender reassignment surgery, which was and still is illegal for minors in the UK and is now illegal in Thailand. (In fact, the legal age for SRS was raised to 18 not long after the Greens went there for the surgery.)
In a 2012 BBC 3 documentary, Ms. Green confirmed that her child underwent full GRS in Thailand. The narrator [4:15] states that Ms. Green’s child was “the youngest person in the world to change gender through surgery.”
It must indeed have been painful for Ms. Green to see a tweet in which someone says she had her child castrated, but the statement is not untrue. In fact, this type of surgery involves far more than castration, which refers only to the removal of the testicles in natal males. But Ms. Keen-Minshull used the word “castrated” to make an important point: GRS is a euphemism that conceals the drastic nature of this medical intervention.
And if it seems unfair that Ms. Keen-Minshull singles out Ms. Green, we must remember that she is not merely a mother who did what she believed to be right for her child. As CEO of Mermaids, she is an advocate for the use of these interventions in other people’s children. Mermaids has provided training and education to various UK government agencies, including schools and (interestingly) the UK police force. Mermaids representatives regularly attend Pride parades and other events to reach out to gender-nonconforming children and teens to inform them about transition. Ms. Green cannot reasonably expect that others won’t point out the full reality of these interventions if she is promoting them for other children.
Ms. Keen-Minshull also came under fire for a tweet that said Mermaids “prey[s] on homosexual teens,” alluding to the organization’s efforts to reach out to gender nonconforming and gender dysphoric children, many of whom (many decades of research have shown) grow up to be gay or lesbian.
The 4thWaveNow website has previously featured articles about Mermaids and its influence on UK policymaking, as well as their efforts to circumvent parents and appeal directly to children and teens.
Although our website hosts authors from both North America and the UK, 4thWaveNow is based in the United States, which protects the freedom of speech via the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. If that were not the case, we too might have been interrogated by the police, because Ms. Green’s complaint (which we have seen but are not at liberty to share at this time) also cited a tweet we issued in the summer of 2017:
We decided to raise this question in our tweet, after seeing this one posted by Mermaids a few weeks earlier:
As parents of current or formerly trans-identified teens, we are concerned that Mermaids is trying to influence teens whose parents do not share the organization’s definition of “unsupportive.” (In fact, as parents who try to help our kids find ways to feel comfortable in their natural bodies – at least until they are adults, we are being supportive.) And the fact that Mermaids feels empowered to publicly state its intention to influence teens like ours is all the more troubling.
We and Ms. Keen-Minshull are far from alone in believing that Mermaids oversteps appropriate boundaries in advocating for transgender services for children. In October 2016, a court removed a seven-year-old child from his mother’s custody because she was found to have essentially groomed her child into a transgender identity. The mother had been receiving support from Mermaids. The court reportedly ordered the child should have no further contact with the charity. (See “The boy who ‘lived in stealth’: Judge challenges ‘emerging orthodoxy.’”)
Twitter’s role in the interrogation of Ms. Keen-Minshull
Although it’s troubling enough to think that a supposed democratic Western nation would interrogate someone for expressing her opinion, it’s even more troubling to hear that a US-based company revealed the person’s identity to the government. According to Ms. Keen-Minshull, the police informed her that they had obtained her contact information from Twitter.
This is not the first time that Twitter has shown its bias in the battle between adherents of gender ideology and those who see dangers in it. Gender-critical individuals have had their Twitter accounts suspended for merely stating that “transwomen are men” while adherents of gender ideology regularly direct misogynistic language like “cunt” or “Kill All TERFs” at people who disagree with them.
It turns out that individuals associated with Mermaids are also guilty of mud-slinging on Twitter. “Helen” (@Mimmymum), who has frequently stated she is a member of Mermaids, regularly brandishes the word “bigot” at those who don’t share her opinions. In a tweet referring to Dr. Ray Blanchard, an American-Canadian sexologist, best known for his research studies on transsexualism and sexual orientation, she writes:
Both sides of this debate are exercising their democratic right to express their opinions and their concerns about public policy, but it appears that both the UK police and Twitter have chosen to respect the rights of the one while disregarding the rights of the other.
Uncomfortable truths
Ms. Green and her organization suggest that those who oppose the transitioning of minors are motivated by bigotry and hate. They refuse to acknowledge that this opposition could stem from genuine concern for the welfare of children and outrage that organizations like hers promote transition so eagerly and misrepresent the realities of it.
In a segment on BBC Newsnight in November 2016, Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of the organization Transgender Trend, said that “the treatment pathway [for treating trans-identified children is] … cross-sex hormones…. It leads to children being sterilized and on medication for life.” When the interviewer asked Ms. Green if this were correct, she answered, “Well, no,” then changed the subject. (See “Should Mermaids be permitted to influence UK public policy on ‘trans kids’?”)
Yet this statement is correct, and it’s acknowledged to be so by clinicians who promote and administer these treatments. While the word “castration” may be jarring, Ms. Keen-Minshull used it because it exposed the reality that activists like Ms. Green would evidently rather conceal.
Ms. Keen-Minshull believes strongly, as do we at 4thWaveNow, that drastic interventions like these deserve public scrutiny. To be able to express our concerns about these interventions, we must be able to name them. If people no longer have the right to speak uncomfortable truths because others may find them offensive, a democratic society is no longer possible.
Reblogged this on GenderTrender.
Just for accuracy: Susie Green did not take her 16-year-old to Thailand for the operation, she took her 15-year-old there so he could have the operation on his 16th birthday. Not a day to waste!
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.” ―George Orwell
A long time ago, kids were thought to be “small adults”. They were made to work, even in tough situations like coal mines, etc. It took a big sea change for people to realize that children are qualitatively different than adults. Since then, western countries have understood that adults must protect children, as they are not yet able to do it for themselves. Even people who have no interest in having children feel that kids should be protected. Even self-absorbed young adults know that children should be protected. Everyone. It’s a strong part of western culture.
Which makes it all the more incredible that agencies, professionals, schools, and governments have accepted what trans ideology wants (demands) with no consideration of the other side of the issues. Even medical doctors and mental health professionals are going along with it (which is especially upsetting, as they *definitely* know better). Psychotherapists are supposed to explore issues with their clients. For instance, if they knew a client had been raped a few months earlier, and then the client suddenly started talking about wanting to transition to being a man – that’s pretty clearly a progression that should be explored to see if there is a connection – and yet therapists are pushed to comply with the “affirmation only” approach of trans ideology. Transitioning, even social transitioning, have huge ramifications for the rest of a child’s life. Why are agencies, professionals, schools, and governments not demanding to learn the other viewpoint prior to making decisions? There is plenty of information out there. The time to review this information opposing “affirmation only” is *before* changes are made to a child’s life. Where is the debate?
What happened to our strong cultural belief in protecting children?
In the U.S. we have had some horrific school shootings. They receive, rightly, a lot of media attention. And yet, *every weekend* basically the same number of people are murdered with guns in our inner cities as are killed in one periodic school shooting – and many of them are youth. We don’t hear about them – and yet these murders comprise the majority of the shooting murders.
Why don’t we hear about them? Because they happen in the inner cities, often in cities with strict gun control, but are committed by hoodlums with illegal guns? Politicians can’t look like they’re doing something by talking about new laws in these situations, b/c there is already strict control in places like Chicago, and criminals don’t care about laws anyway. Is it because most people don’t live in the inner cities, so we don’t care? Because it’s usually black on black violence, is that why we don’t care?
I think that the feeling that “it happens to someone else, in a different type of place, so it won’t happen to us” is one of the reasons that those weekly murders aren’t given attention. And it makes me wonder if this is partly what is happening when our “leaders” and institutions and professionals don’t give attention to the evidence contrary to trans ideology.
In terms of parents, on the one hand you have parents who are fully supporting their child’s young transition (even at 3 years old! Fishy fishy fishy!), who are likely to not want to hear anything that might make them wonder if they have done the right thing. On the other hand, perhaps we have parents who are certain this situation couldn’t happen to them, and so aren’t paying attention, and only hear the “headlines”, the one-sided information that is allowed to stand on its own. The voices of the parents, who know their kids as well as any parents know their kids, who are speaking out against this are ignored.
Politicians – well, they’re politicians. That probably explains them. But medical and mental health professionals? They know what is going on. And there is a professional risk for them to be speaking out, but there are a LOT of them out there. If they were to stand up together, they would have power.
Twitter and the UK government collaborating to possibly charge someone with a crime for expressing her opinion *and* facts? This is a really scary place. We’re not protecting children, we’re not exploring all sides of the issues to make sure we’re doing the right thing, and we’re having our free speech killed so that a one-sided, potentially dangerous point of view can have unearned credibility.
Again I ask, what happened to our strong cultural belief in protecting children?
The transkids phenomenon is all wrapped up in a pretty bow of ‘protecting children.’
You want your child to feel loved and accepted, right? You don’t want your child to be bullied and outcast to the point of suicide do you? And you, as a parent, don’t want to be the one to make your child feel that way….
Combine that with a secret guilt trip over your aversion to having a gay kid and the media narrative of how brave and supportive these parents are and why wouldn’t you let your child be trans?
It’s a marketing campaign and a very effective one too, unfortunately.
if any other group of people were being sterilized before they could give meaningful consent, how would liberals respond?
“…and (interestingly) the UK police force. ” – Point of fact there is no UK Police Force, there are around 50 different police forces around the UK
To clarify the court order in the case of the mother and the child – Mermaids often like to assert that they were not issued with a court order by the judge. They can say this because it will be true. The order would have been issued to the person(s) with parental responsibility in the case (ie the father or the mother or the state agencies if the child was in care) and would prohibit those person(s) from having contact with Mermaids about the child. The effect is the same but this misunderstanding is what allows Mermaids to claim that the judge in the case did not order them to have no contact with the child.
Well said, 4thWave, this scary turn of events needs as much publicity as possible.
In effect, the ideological bent of communism is being presented here. Think about it. How many folks were jailed and eliminated for speaking truth? If we keep on this track, it will omly get worse. We are redifining 2+2 to be equal to 5. No one considers that it is the mind that is broken and not the body. So lets take a perfectly healthy body and break it to match a broken mind. It is heinous.
The scariest section of “1984” is when Winston Smith actually saw the 4th finger… “BIg Brother says I am holding up 4 fingers, so how many am I holding up?” (three) … and then… he actually *saw* them. The blood runs cold.
The fact that they effortlessly and constantly say this stuff means they really do believe it–they *see* the 4th finger.
When someone uses the term “castrated”–it suddenly reminds them there are only 3 fingers and they have fully hallucinated the 4th.
People don’t like to be told they are hallucinating and delusional, so that’s the major reason for the Inquisition. Children are pawns in this war and entirely secondary.
Well, when they are castrated, they certainly lose a finger there. Sorry, I could not resist. 😎
I don’t know about the UK becoming a police state, but something very bad is happening with Twitter. For the last 4 years I have followed the debate and the personalities involved around transgender issues, radical feminism and the erasure of women’s rights. Mostly this has been through blogs, such as this one, and the media. Recently I have noticed that the discussion has moved more and more to the Twitter platform.
Recently in the UK women have held meetings to discuss the consequences of proposed changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act which would allow self-identification without any medical or legal procedures. Women and gender-critical speakers were systematically excluded from Maria Miller’s parliamentary enquiry into these changes. Venice Allen, a gender-critical radical feminist organised a meeting which eventually saw it’s venue as the House of Commons, to discuss the Labour Party’s inclusion of trans-identifying men on all women’s short lists. There is an excellent write up by Lily Maynard here……https://lilymaynard.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/transgenderism-and-the-war-on-women-house-of-commons-14-3-18/
This morning I discovered that Venice Allen’s @Dr Radfem Twitter account had been suspended. I have no idea why.
Yesterday a storm brew up on Twitter because JK Rowling had “inadvertently” liked a tweet that referred to “men in dresses”. Her publicists claim “I’m afraid J.K. Rowling had a clumsy and middle-aged moment and this is not the first time she has favourited by holding her phone incorrectly.’
http://metro.co.uk/2018/03/22/jk-rowling-comes-fire-liking-tweet-calling-trans-women-men-dresses-7407959/?ito=cbshare
As a middle-aged woman 5 years senior to JK Rowling I strongly object to the insinuation that I make social gaffes because of my age and sex. No one uses that excuse, except men on behalf of women.
The author of the original tweet has now made her Twitter account private with the following….”My tweets are now protected because three wealthy celebs – JK Rowling, Shon Faye, Jack Monroe – think it ok to dogpile on working class feminist to silence her. Woman.”
JK Rowling we know of. Shon Faye is described here in an excellent article by Meghan Murphy of Feminist Current…http://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/11/23/trans-activists-truly-cared-feminism-respect-womens-spaces/
Jack Monroe is a celebrity gender-fluid chef who,earlier this month, allegedly could no longer stand the toxicity of Twitter…..https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/03/01/author-jack-monroe-quits-twitter-for-the-good-of-their-mental-health/ except when she wants to use twitter to come back at others it seems.
Susie Green is a driven woman who will spend the rest of her life justifying what she did to her son.
I don’t live in the US or the UK and I don’t have a Twitter account…..yet.
From what I’ve just read about this, Keen-Minshull lives in Wiltshire but was interviewed by West Yorkshire police. Does anyone know what that was about?
This puts claims that transgender is an oppressed group somewhat into perspective. Can you be threatened with arrest for disagreeing with any other oppressed group? Can you imagine the police showing up at your house because you criticised the Black Panthers? Or being brought in for questioning for thinking Andrea Dworkin was wrong?
From what I’ve just read about this, Keen-Minshull lives in Wiltshire but was interviewed by West Yorkshire police. Does anyone know what that was about?
I imagine it was because Mermaids is based in Leeds.
I’m so grateful to this site for creating a place where it’s still possible to argue against the insane cruelty of transitioning children. It seems as if the men who run social media are trying to turn the online world into a virtual police state whose goal is the control of women, aided by people with influence in the analog world who have lost their minds, succumbed to mass hysteria, or taken advantage of an opportunity to push back against the rights feminists have fought for. At every stage in the feminist movement, men have used the excuse of “The children!” to suppress women’s agency, from suffrage to careers, but now that some women are concerned about the medication and mutilation of healthy children, that’s being turned on its head and portrayed as bigotry and abuse to keep us from speaking out.
Also, some trans identified men may see the transitioning of children as providing cover for their own more fetishistic desires. As Autumn Sandeen said in an interview quoted by Gallus Mag on GenderTrender back in 2012, it would help the transgender movement to emphasize children because “they demystify it and take the sex right out of the trans experience.” (https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/transgender-children-the-transgender-taboo-is-a-threat-to-academic-freedom/) Men like that are willing to permanently damage chldren to support their fetish, abetted by those parents who don’t want GNC offspring, in part because they suspect they may end up gay or lesbian, or parents whose motives are even more twisted (attention seeking along the line of Munchausen’s by Proxy, etc.). Because on some level these people know they don’t have good evidence for childhood transition and their motives are self-serving, they try to suppress opposition by any means they can.
It’s telling that Susie Green and the West Yorkshire police have chosen to threaten Ms. Keen-Minshull. If they make an example of a stay-at-home mother and liberal feminist primarily concerned with the well-being of children–someone whom many others will see as an ordinary woman–they may hope to frighten a lot of other women into silence, which means they can concentrate their efforts on a few voices easy to portray as a radical minority, a typical authoritarian strategy. The absurd accusations against women remind me of the Salem witch trials and what Martha Carrier, one of the accused, said to a magistrate, “It is false and a shame for you to mind what these say, that are out of their wits!”
Well stated Oak and Ash.
This incident should be a huge wake up call. I believe another incident where a gentleman in Britain criticized religious extremism of guess what religion on Twitter also received a visit from British police but I can’t confirm. And the recent prosecution for a joke in that country. Is a slow death happening in Britain or what. The far right and the far left are untrustworthy and dangerous. Centrism isn’t about being wishy washy as many on the right and left like to claim. It’s about airing all sides and all opinions before deciding the most effective approach which may be a left, right, or centrist solution. And free speech and free thought are essential to that. The fact that anything that doesn’t threaten violence, murder, or even rights restrictions is being considered as a hate crime needs confrontation now. If this happens in the US I will chain myself to some building somewhere.
Hello,
The part about the euphemism of “SRS” and the term “castration” have reminded me of a piece I wrote a little while ago, when I was trying to articulate what disturbed me about the medical language used in the transgender community. I have tried to make it as detailed as I could, so it is quite long (approximately 10 pages), but I am wondering if you would be interested in reading it regardess?
Please link to it.
Great article … this is my first post here, but I’ve lurked here before & recommended this blog to parents of questioning teens. FWIW, I’m an adult lesbian who dressed “like a boy” as a child in the 1970s. (Back when kids were “free to be you & me”.)
I feel compelled to note that …well, this might sound crazy but the world is crazy right now…anyway…
Putin used social media to interfere with the last US presidential election. It’s now being reported that Cambridge Analytics also used private data that they purchased from Twitter & FB for the pro-Brexit campaign.
“Outbreaks” of this social contagion have swept across the UK, Canada, the USA, & Australia…
Maybe it’s not a coincidence? Social media is now enforcing social norms. And Putin has learned how to exploit social media to disrupt the West & empower himself.
Wouldn’t it make sense if Putin started this T insanity just to mess with us…disrupt our society & cause conflict?
For years now I’ve wondered how the Ts so effortlessly changed laws in their favor without resistance…whereas it took the American Civil Rights movement a decade & lots of martyrs to get the Voting Rights Act passed. Hm…maybe the T movement isn’t grassroots?
I’ve also wondered how on earth this madness will stop (because it’s not sustainable).
My hope now is that someone will spill the T on Putin — and disclose that this “social contagion” was engineered by him. And then maybe when that’s fully realized…it will also disappear & feminists like myself can focus on more important things…like ending the global epidemic of violence against women & children.
Thank you …
Who knows, it’s the wild west out there …. if the seemingly innocuous apps like Farmville can be used for surreptitious data collection and subsequent election shenanigans, anything’s possible, I suppose.
But if I’m reaching for my tinfoil hat, I’m probably more warily eyeing Pritzker, Soros, and the transhumanist contingent. Once the “reshape your body” idea is normalized, there is no reason on earth not to keep going to medicalize otherkin, machine-human hybrids, whatever.
Sounds looney tunes but there are a few transactivists who openly admit they see themelves as the first wave of a new species. For instance, Martine Rothblatt identifies as a transhumanist, not only transgender.
If you want to talk about a cash cow, surely this is the next step. If there is no THERE there vis a vis biology, no actual definition of “male” or “female,” and no need to connect reproduction to such “outdated” dimorphic concepts, the sky’s the limit, yes?
I agree with you that, whatever is going on, the rapid onset of the ideology and especially the quick infiltration into elementary schools and into legislation is enough to whip your head back.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/
Hmmmm. My mtf son used to play a ton of Farmville.
Sent from Doug Pounds mobile
That is THE most nonsensical load of BS distractification I have EVER read.
This is ALL to do with Lefty Neoliberal Neomarxist Globalists – Putin doesn’t want *that* rainbow flag in his country exactly because it leads to this!
You looking to pin the blame?
Soros/Clinton/Obama
Wave that fascist rainbow flag now!
It’s the Rainbow Reich and they are coming for your children.
I have thought this too. But I don’t think its Putin. Lots of companies have a social media presence and people that work for them to maintain that presence. It would not surprise me one bit to find out that Big Pharma has social media plants stirring things up and making sure there’s a continuing market for E, T and blockers.
The UK has always been a police state. The only question is will it continue into the future as one?
Hi there 4th Wavers. I am post-op transsexual and vehemently disagree with what’s being done here – and I want to help.
I went through a court battle in 2003 for custody of my son and the ruling sets a UK Legal Precedent that at the very least children of 10 aren’t old enough to understand cross gender identification.
I am willing to appear as an expert witness if need be and provide all the documents from my case to the defence team.
It is now my assertion that this is actually brainwashing – it’s taken me years to wake up and it only cost me my genitals to find out. We need to drag all this back to somewhere approaching sanity.
I am willing to help in any way I can.
Transwomen are NOT women and there is NO SUCH THING as ‘transphobia’.
This is both outrageous and egregious – and a complete waste of the taxpayer’s money as well as Police time.
It’s time things changed.
Hello infamousT, I would like to talk with you in private about how you can help. I have some ideas. You can contact me at stormnewhampshire@gmail.com
I am glad you came here.
I don’t have an issue with what Ms. Keen-Minshull said in her Tweet, although her choice of words was clearly offensive and probably deliberately so. It clearly is an outrage that there was police involvement at all, but the UK, today, is actually a police State.
While, again, it should not be the subject of criminal procedure, this section : ‘Ms. Keen-Minshull also came under fire for a tweet that said Mermaids “prey[s] on homosexual teens,” alluding to the organization’s efforts to reach out to gender nonconforming and gender dysphoric children, many of whom (many decades of research have shown) grow up to be gay or lesbian.’ which is satated as a quote from mS Keen-Minshull is deeply problematic.
In the first place, there is no evidence whatsoever that it is a ‘better outcome’ for a GNC child to be ‘gay’ or lesbian rather than transsexual. All GNC children who later become trans are by definition HomoSexual TransSexuals, that is, they are exclusively attracted to the same sex. HSTS have for many decades been the victims of reparative therapies designed to condition them into being ‘”gay” or lesbian’ rather than transsexual and MtF HSTS are routinely insulted and abused by members of the ‘gay’ community as ‘traitors to the cause’.
If it is unacceptable to use psychological and other techniques to attempt to condition young people to be heterosexual rather than homosexual, then it must be equally so to use the same or similar techniques to condition them to be ‘gay’ or lesbian rather than transsexual. Although it is often presented in other terms, this is the crux of the issue that caused the CAMH clinic to be closed and Dr Zucker to be fired.
It is quite possible, indeed likely, that an increase in HSTS in both sexes will lead to a reduction in gender-conforming homosexual presentations. This is born out by observation in SE Asia.
The second point is that the studies used — they’re always the same ones — to suggest that ‘many’ gender non-conforming children grow up to be ‘gay’ or lesbian do NOT mean that ALL GNC children, left to their own devices, will do so. Further, the studies quoted in Dr Cantor’s article are highly suspect; all but 4 are over 30 years old and the remainder show severe methodological problems. (I have addressed some of these in a response to the linked article.) Further, please note that Dr Cantor is himself on recent record as saying that even if many GNC children do desist, there are still those who do not. It is hard to see some of the rhetoric here as anything other than a blatant attempt to erase this group. HSTS are unquestionably the most vicitmised group in society, the last thing they need is more quackery to persuade them to be ‘gay or lesbian’.
Most parents who congregate on this website have no illusions that their children will not make their own choices in adulthood. But most here see a lifetime free of extreme hormonal and surgical intervention as preferable. Not so long ago, this was not seen as a controversial position to take. And yes, nowadays with the transgender movement, many young people who very likely would grow up to be happy lesbians or gay men are now opting for earlier and earlier medical intervention. You may choose to label attempts by Dr. Zucker and others to help children be comfortable in their own skin as “conversion therapy“ if you wish. But if you believe, as many of us do here, that a life as a sterilized, permanent medical patient should only be reserved for the rare few who can’t come to terms with their bodies in adulthood, you would consider that more cautious approach to be ethical and compassionate intervention.
Well, I am a parent too, for a start. Then, in most of the world, where transsexualism is far more prevalent than in the West, GRS is extremely rare. Hormone dosages are very low, certainly in comparison to the levels typically prescribed in the West; and in any case, we all face a lifetime on hormones, otherwise we’d be dead.
I consider Dr Zucker to be a well-meaning, sympathetic man whose opinions I respect, and I am very uncomfortable with the manner of his defenestration; but the fact is that if you examine his language in many interviews, his position is clearly that of a conversion therapist. What else does ‘get rid of the barbies’ mean? Similarly Dr Bailey, another for whom I have great respect and time, claims to agree with Zucker in that ‘it is a better outcome to be “gay” or lesbian’ than to be transsexual. But there is absolutely ZERO evidence to support this claim.
ALL childhood GNC individuals, if they persist, will be, by definition, homosexual transsexuals, That is, exclusively attracted to their own sex. If you examine the clear clustering of physical and behavioural characteristics around this type, certainly for MtF where there is more data, then it is quite clear that these individuals are naturally feminised. (We are NOT talking about Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner or Justin ‘Riley’ Dennis here; they are autogynephilic.) We do not know the mechanism by which MtF HSTS become feminised (or FtM masculinised) but statistical and observational data, again and again, confirms that they exhibit a cluster of characteristics.
For such individuals to live in the gender that might be assumed from their birth sex is a torture. They are NEVER ‘happy gay or lesbian’ people and we need to torpedo that myth. Within the ‘gay’ community they are routinely bullied and reviled for being ‘too feminine’ — something they cannot help at all. You cannot successfully condition such a person to be ‘happy in their own skin’ and all you make are bitter, resentful and deeply sad adults who feel betrayed by everyone. My mailbox has many messages from people to whom this has happened and their stories are heartbreaking. And it is this that the blanket ‘no trans’ political mantra you are expressing facilitates: miserable, sad people, betrayed by their parents and the society around them.
Let us be clear: we are seeing a sea-change. The suppression of HSTS, which has been brutally applied in the West by Church, State, professional therapists, LGB political activists and parents, is finally being broken. We are going to see a re-alignment, bringing the West into step with other parts of the world, like SE Asia or South America, where you can’t put your head out the door without seeing somebody trans. This WILL mean a reduction in gender-conforming ‘gay’ expressions, because, as far as we know, there is a finite number of homosexuals in any population. Why would that bother anyone?
I condemn outright the ‘transing’ of pre-pubescent children, but the blanket ‘no trans’ approach has too many negative consequences. It impacts on research that might be able to establish a predictive set of diagnostic measures (we know that persistence is related to the intensity and type of childhood GNC but we do not understand the mechanisms) and it condemns many genuine HSTS to a life of misery (few HSTS in the West will transition after the age of 23; a great deal of effort is made to condition them such that they are locked into a life-path long before this. To suggest that effort is always ‘in the child’s interest’ is at best disingenuous.) And these are just the most obvious effects of the ‘no trans’ policy.
HSTS are unquestionably one of the most severely marginalised groups in Western society today. It’s about time people started speaking up for them, rather than trying to maintain a social status quo which is, in any case, utterly doomed. When you gave your kids smartphones and social media, you gave them the tools to develop networks that closely parallel the real-life support networks found elsewhere in the world. This is going to happen, whether you like it or not; my advice is to make peace with your kids and find out what THEY actually want, not what you or others think they SHOULD want.
I advise extreme caution and a ‘wait and see’ approach, but this does NOT mean ‘give us a few years for the quacks to condition the kids out of this nonsense’. It means genuine neutrality and respect, and an understanding that being HSTS IS NOT a failure. It is a genuine acceptance of who and what that person really is.
“HSTS are unquestionably the most vicitmised group in society, the last thing they need is more quackery to persuade them to be ‘gay or lesbian’.”
It’s not persuading someone to be gay if they actually Are gay.
Up until a decade or so ago we had the same quackery persuading kids Not to be gay, telling them they could choose to be straight. Tell me how the transkid rhetoric you ‘re championing isn’t a blatant attempt to erase gay and lesbian kids?
All anyone here is saying is that we should find out which is which before making irreparrable physical changes all on the say so of children who definitely do not have all of the facts. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?
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