#67

Heather Brunskell-Evans

The Invention of Transgender Children. 

FiLiA conference 2019

Heather: My name is Heather Brunskell-Evans, and I'm an academic and a writer and a political activist. And some of you may know that my colleague Michele Moore and I have had some difficulty in getting out our second book on the transgendering of children. It is called ‘Inventing Transgender Children’. It is now published.

My talk is actually called the Invention of the Transgender Child and when I proposed it to somebody, a clinician actually, who was very much on board with mine and Michele's view, she thought the invention of the transgender child was possibly a hurtful title to some people. And I understand that, particularly if you are a parent. Nevertheless, my thesis is that transgender children don't exist. They are an invention. And this is not to hurt either children with gender dysphoria or parents of children with gender dysphoria. 

Hopefully this is a way out of a political situation, not increasing the tensions of a political situation.

I shall start. So the liberal view of the transgender child is that he or she is real, and this is based on the same philosophical argument that a transwoman is real, not that he is a male human being who has a right to identify as female. But that he is a woman and has been since birth i.e. he was born female.

So certain concepts are used in order to justify the claim that a man who identifies as a woman really is a woman. And these are the two basic concepts: that biological sex is socially constructed, but that gender identity is pre-social. It's inherent somehow. It's a born property. 

These concepts have political and ethical consequences. The claim that an adult man can be truly female in the male body and vice versa positively requires the invention of the existential transgender child. The argument goes something like this:

The trans woman or trans man can't help being trans. It isn't a choice or an identification or a socially induced phenomenon. It just is a fact for which one is not responsible.

Entering onto the stage, there comes the transgender child, so he was used for this purpose.

So the book ‘Inventing Transgender Children and Young People’ explores the serious safeguarding issues, both social and medical, which have emerged as a consequence of the invention of the transgender child, and in so doing the book explores the role of the Gender Identity Development Service, otherwise known as GIDS at The Tavistock. 

The Tavistock has at its core, the redefinition of sex and of gender identity defined by transgender theory. And transgender theory has been developing over the last 30 years. It's not something new. It's been going on, it's been developing and it's still developing since the end of the 20th century.

The Tavistock in my view is deeply embedded and influenced by this theory, and it also has at its core, an intimate relationship with lobby groups such as Mermaids, GIRES and Gendered Intelligence. 

So, in my chapter in the book, I make the claim that the Tavistock itself has helped invent the transgender child within the political psychodynamic force field of trans activism and transgender theory.

So the theory and language of transgenderism has performed a lot of philosophical and ideological work in shaping societal values and sensibilities, including, I argue, the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, the 2010 Equality Act and the Women Equalities Committee, 2015 to 2016, report on transgender equality. 

I am going to just read out a little bit from the Equality Act 2010 about gender reassignment as a protected characteristic.

So this is what it says: 

To be protected from gender reassignment discrimination, you do not need to have undergone any specific treatment or surgery to change from your birth sex to your preferred gender. This is because changing your physiological or other gender attributes is a personal process rather than a medical one. You can be at any stage in that transition process from proposing to reassign your gender to undergoing a process to reassign your gender or having completed it. 

And then I would like to read out something from the women. (I hope you noted there was intended to be irony in my voice there).

The Women and Equality committee report of 2016 says:

Fairness and equality are basic British values. A litmus test for any society that upholds those values is how far it protects even the most marginalised groups. Britain has been among countries going furthest in recognising lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights but we are still failing this test and respect of trans people.

And I'd like to add the people, the organisations that the Women and Equalities Committee, consulted with, were not women but trans lobby groups. For example, Stonewall and Mermaids, who've also have been very influential in the theory that is adopted by some clinicians at the Tavistock. 

So, what have been the political consequences for women and children of this attempt at social justice?

I think social justice is something that we should all work for. I'm not against social justice, but what have been the political consequences for women and children of the alternative social justice through deploying the new language? The concepts I was talking about earlier are affirming, self-declared gender identity.

I'm just going to rehearse some, you'll be familiar with them. These are the ones that are the impact that has been for women. 

So we have genitally intact male prisoners, many of whom are incarcerated because of violent sexual offences, men who identify as women are housed in women's prisons.

Men who identify as women are now allowed, we are told, in National Health Service, single sex hospital bay. Male bodied athletes can compete in women's sports and so on. The list is almost endless. You can add some more examples yourself.

So, when women gather together to discuss our own protected characteristics, i.e. sex and the breach of our human rights, then we are described as bigots, haters and transphobes. Well, exactly the same dynamics pertain for those of us who named the impact of children of trans ideology. There have been constant attempts for about two and a half years since the first book came out on Michele and myself to silence our views.

So what are the views that are so utterly dangerous that we have to have our minds shut about this? They are these: the reinvention of the transgender child results in the abuse of the rights of children who find themselves the subject of medical intervention. It's a breach of their rights, physical health and bodily integrity. In contrast, what actually happens, if there's medical invention, this almost certainly leads to sterility, lack of adult sexual function, the inability to actually change sex, for which they have allegedly as children given consent. 

But the invention of the transgender child is also the abuse of the rights of all children and young people. These are the rights to scientific knowledge of human biology to social conditions compatible with mental health, including freedom from the current queer obsession with matters of sexuality and gender identity. 

So we need to think what progressivism is outside of Liberalism's uncritical naive acceptance that gender identity is true and the ridiculous liberal denial of biological facts that in human beings, who are mammals, in fact, we have binary sexual, reproductive organs. 

So liberals, including some clinicians, seem to use the same language as radical feminists. They talk about the fact that the transgendering of children is, in some sense, it contributes to the critique of heteronormativity and the institutional power that children will be subject to when they go to school, when all the books are heteronormative, when the lessons are heteronormative, and so on and so forth. 

But we know that the new language is not in women's or children's interests, and therefore it is not about inclusivity, social justice or progressivism. And in my view, we need to go back to the language of second wave feminists in order to go forward.

The crucial difference in the language, as second wave feminists also critique heteronormativity, they are the first people to critique heteronormativity, the crucial difference is in the concepts.

The critique of heteronormativity from a radical feminist's point of view is that sex is binary, but that it is gender that is socially constructed. So sex is a material biological reality and it is gender that's socially constructed. And the minute you start losing that, we have all the consequences that are before us for women and for children and of course that was a genuinely progressive shift in the language because it benefited both sexes. It also allows male children, for example, not to be subject to the stereotypes of masculinity. So in order to be himself, he doesn't have to identify as a girl. He can be a boy who is himself. 

So I'm going to conclude by saying that trans ideology is actually retrograde. It sets us back decades. It doesn't give children freedom from gender stereotypes, but it binds them ever closer to traditional ideas of what it is to be a boy or a girl, or a woman or a man. And it is imperative for groups and organisations inside and outside of gender medicine to challenge the theory and politics of the invention of a transgender child. Despite the ferocious political backlash, it will inevitably entail. Thank you.

Susan Matthews: My training is as a literary critic and a historian of sex and gender, and I've become particularly interested in the invention of gender identity ideology, and how it functions.

My talk today is really going to be about the cultural construction of the transgender child, and I'm going to try to suggest some of the reasons why there's been such a huge growth in numbers really over the last 20 years. 

I will start by telling a story of two children, one child from the 1990s and another child from the 21st century from about 2015.

And I'm then going to go on and look at some of the books produced for the trans child. 

So child one was born in the nineties, I'm going to call him Arthur. He's the youngest of three children with two other flamboyant older sisters. By the age of four, it's striking that Arthur loves dressing up, especially wearing his older sister's fuchsia pink tutus and sparkly shoes, and his mother is very arty and dressing up is encouraged. No one makes a big deal. He's not taken to a doctor or a gender specialist. In fact, no one really has heard about gender specialists for little boys who like tutus in the 1990s. They do exist, but mostly they sit in an empty office and see just a handful of children a year. There's some discussion about whether Arthur should go to nursery in a tutu.

In the end, the mother simply chooses him androgynous clothes in the brightest, pinkest, most flowery colours she can find. So what she's doing is she's challenging that whole business of gender stereotypes, building on the analysis of second wave feminism. They go on actually like this very happily until one day when Arthur is 11, his mother comes home with a flowery sweatshirt and Arthur says, I don't want this. I want a navy blue one. We know how Arthur has turned out because he's a child of the 1990s. At age 18 he's a markedly feminine boy. He's happily exploring his identity and his sexuality. He may well be gay. But that's his business.

So child two, I'm going to call Johnny was four last year in 2018. So he's a product of the early 21st century. He loves pink, shiny backpacks and wears a rainbow skirt and lycra leggings, his mother knows that she has a trans kid and his educated granny in the nursery about the need to affirm his identity as a girl.

She's brought him every trans kid book available, and there are lots available. She particularly likes this book. ‘Who Are You? The Kids' Guide to Gender Identity’ by Brooke Pessin-Whedbe. It contains simple affirmations. ‘The important thing to remember is that you are the one who knows you best.’ 

Presumably true, but I don't know what that means.

The book helps Johnny to distinguish between sex’ assigned at birth’ and gender, which is your personal expression. What you like, how you dress and act. So now we've got the reversal between sex as culturally constructed and gender as an innate soul, that Heather was talking about.

And of course, Arthur in the 1990s was perfectly able to express his gender without these concepts. Johnny also learns that people say there are only two genders, but there are really many genders. He's learned that the word cisgender means when someone's identity matches their sex assigned at birth, and this phrase trips easily off Johnny's tongue at nursery.

 Obviously it doesn't trip easily off Johnny's tongue at nursery. Really what I'm saying is that the language of these books is not the language of a child. It's a language which is provided by adults, and it's aimed, I think, particularly at mothers. I think mothers are being schooled in what is presented as a liberal, progressive, new set of beliefs. 

And I also suspect that mothers have actually been used to police gender stereotypes to make sure that little boys are masculine and little girls are feminine in the way that actually happened back in the sixties. So there's a kind of regression to cultural gender stereotypes.

So the language of this book is a kind of ludicrous language for a four-year-old. Johnny learns that he can choose from genders. He can choose whether to be trans. These are all quotes: trans, gender-queer, non-binary, gender fluid, transgender, gender neutral, a-gender, bi-gender, third gender, or two spirit, which is just the sort of thing that four year olds worry about!

Johnny’s granny has also been educated in gender. She's a little bit worried, but she's talked to a therapist friend who explained that puberty blockers may well help when Johnny is older. She knows that blockers provide ‘breathing space’ and a pause button that help a child to decide when to go ahead with cross-sex hormones when the time comes.

Now, in fact, these two are real kids, obviously with changed names. I know them both. I didn't really need to use real examples, because these are absolutely typical examples of these two historical moments. It's also, I think, typical that the youngest children who are being identified as having problematic gender dysphoria are boys, later in the teen surge we know that it's 75% girls around the ages of 14 and 15 who are going to the Tavistock. 

So we know what happens when Arthur gets to 18, child one, but we don't know what's going to happen with the Johnny of the 2015 generation. Whether he'll become Julia or not. I hope he'll be happy, whatever happens, but there's no doubt that we are responding differently to young kids who display cross-gender identification, and particularly those who are gender nonconforming. And one of the things that seemed very likely is that we are medically removing gay and lesbian kids.

So I'm going to go on now to talk about a book, which has just won a very prestigious children's book prize. And I don't talk about it in Heather and Michele's book, but it just struck me actually as a really interesting example of the work that children's literature does and the ways in which culture creates a particular reading agenda.

It's called ‘Julian is a Mermaid’ It's actually a strikingly beautiful book. It's not the rubbish of ‘Who are you? The child’s guide to gender identity’. It's been greeted as a celebratory and a ground breaking book, a book that ‘will leave the reader filled with joy’ that made Neil Gaiman tear up and Antony Brown called ‘astonishingly beautiful.’

But when you look at this book, what you discover is that Julian is a mermaid. It tells a story of a boy called Julian, never in the book does it say that Julian wants to be a girl or is uncomfortable with his gender. Julian loves swimming and loves mermaids. Traveling on the subway with his nana, he sees three women dressed as mermaids. When he gets home, he improvises a mermaid costume with ferns and flowers for a headdress and a curtain for a skirt or tail. His nana takes him to see the mermaid procession. So this is a story about a boy whose desire to dress up is cherished by his granny. Nowhere does Julian say he's trans or a girl or he wants to transition when he grows up.

So my question is: is Julian like Arthur, my fictional kid of the 1990s. A kid who loves dresses and who may well turn out to be gay? Or is he Johnny, the trans kid who will probably go on to puberty blockers? If you read the review, I looked at this online, if you read the review on something called Common Sense Media, you'll discover that: ‘Julian is a Mermaid’ by Jessica Love is a story about a boy who wants to be a mermaid that will resonate with all kids who have secret dreams. And that review says nothing about trans or gender identity. Instead, it emphasises culture and community, imagination and fantasy. 

If you read Pink News, however, you discover that ‘Julian is a Mermaid’ is a trans kids' book. Julian is Johnny. According to The Guardian, the win for Jessica Love’s book is a rebuke to bigotry, and the Guardian says: Love’s win falls in a week when an academic has claimed that children are being put at risk by transgender books in UK primary schools.

As it happens, I'm the academic cited in the Telegraph story. So I'd like to think for a moment about whether our criticism of books like ‘Who are You’ really does constitute what the Guardian calls a ‘moral panic.’ I believe that we are working to preserve the bodily integrity of children to allow them to grow up with their sexuality under their own control, and we are working to prevent the imposition of a vocabulary and an explanatory model onto childhood experience, one which is potentially homophobic, which translates childhood experience into terms set by activists. 

We are told to ‘listen to the child’ but no child talks about cisgender and non-binary at the age of four, unless they've been educated by children's books written to tell them how to interpret their own experience.

So ‘Julian is a Mermaid’ is in some ways absolutely fine. It's a lovely book, but in the current climate, it's hard for the Julians to remain free of the categories that Pink News and the Guardian wants to impose on them. 

In fact, we know from an interview with Jessica Love, the author, that she chose the figure of the mermaid after visiting chat rooms for parents of trans kids, she said, ‘I was reading all these parenting blogs and this theme of mermaids is a thread that runs through so many of these different kids' experiences.’ Now she wasn't actually accessing the kids' experiences. She was accessing the parents' chat in the parents' chat room. 

Love says: ‘there's something about mermaids. Who knows if that's because they're magical creatures who can live between two different realities because they don't have any genitals? Well, because they're fucking great.’

Now I think there's something a bit worrying about the celebration of creatures that don't have any genitals. And in fact, I thought that's very revealing. 

It makes me wonder whether the celebration of the trans child is in fact a form of moral panic. An attempt to medically remove the danger that a child may grow up gay.

As Love explains: ‘The mythical creatures have become symbolic to transgender people and their allies. They're depicted as nothing below the waist but a tail, while the Disney film The Little Mermaid has a main character who wants to change form, echoing the feelings of some trans people.’

Okay, now speaking now as a literary critic, critics who write about children's literature often talk about a dual address, about a book which addresses both an adult audience, the parents or the adult readers, and a child audience. And I think this idea helps us to understand what's happening with these children's books.

I want to argue that the success of ‘Julian is a Mermaid,’ and it's won the Stonewall Award, nominated for the Waterstones Award, and now the Klaus Fugo Award for illustrated books, owes something to a very adult reading of the story. Where a child might just see a scene in which Julian turns a curtain into a mermaid costume as imaginative play, an informed adult, an adult who's read Julius Serrano's ‘Whipping Girl’, will hear an echo of the scene in which Julia Serrano discovers that she's actually a woman. As a boy she has this uncontrollable urge to take the curtains and wrap them round as a skirt. Where a child might assume that the women dressed as mermaids are simply women dressed as mermaids, the adult is meant to realise that the mermaids in this story are transvestite men. 

There is nothing in the drawing style that would suggest this to a child reader, and we know that Jessica Love's initial plan was to tell the story of a child who loves drag queens, the annual Cody Island Mermaid parade, that she then replaced after she got the idea of mermaids from the parenting chat forum. It’s not a drag event, but an art parade founded in 1983, which brings mythology to life for local residents who live on streets named Mermaid or Neptune. 

In the current climate with its obsessive fascination with the culturally created figure of the transgender child Loves story is filled with adult meanings.

So I'm just going to end up now by looking at another example of a gender guide and this time it's one which talks about teenage girls. 

So the story in The Telegraph that marked me out as a bigot, creating a moral panic, focused on a book called ‘Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity? A Guide for Friends, Family, and Professionals’ by CJ Atkinson.

This tells the story of Kit, a 12-year-old girl undergoing medical transition, according to the blurb, Kit explains how she realised that she was not a girl but a boy. Well, it's the usual story. When she was born, the doctors told her mum and dad that they had a baby girl, and that's really what happens, isn't it, when you give birth, Heather, you ask the doctors, don’t you? 

I had a midwife at home, so I really could never have known.

So that's how Kit was assigned female at birth. But as Kit grows up, she discovers that she wasn't ever very happy that way because she didn't like playing with dolls or wearing dresses, and she hated having long hair. Poor Kit appears to live in a 1960s time warp. She wants to cut her hair because she believes that short hair is what makes you a boy.

She also feels that she was ‘born in the wrong body’, so 12-year-old Kit applies for a new passport and goes on hormone blockers, which ‘stop my body developing in ways that make me unhappy.’ She tells us that when she's 18, she will be able to start hormone replacement therapy. This means, she says, ‘that I'll start to develop facial hair and my body will go through boy puberty,’ which isn't exactly what happens.

The contention of our chapter then is that this is a crudely didactic guide. This is not an imaginative book, this is a book trying to tell you one answer, not only misrepresents crucial facts about the serious side effects of puberty blockers, but might encourage gender nonconforming children to believe that there was something wrong with their bodies.

The two books are entirely different. The visually beautiful book which one applies is not itself a book about a trans child. The other is a tract which misrepresents current knowledge about medical intervention for children with gender dysphoria. To use such a book in schools, I do think is clearly dangerous and ‘Can I Tell You about Gender Diversity’ is part of a pack that schools are encouraged to buy to educate and celebrate for use in schools. 

So I don't think the concerns we are expressing are ‘moral panic’. A gender nonconforming girl such as Kit is overwhelmingly likely, if un-medicated, to grow up to be a lesbian, if she managed to avoid medical intervention which will distort her sexuality.

After two years on cross-sex hormones, we know that there are often serious side effects. 

I'm going to draw it to a close, then. I'm not really going to talk about the chapter I've written on gender identity guides and workbooks, which engages very much more with queer theory and basically tries to sort of, take the moral high ground. I mean, basically it says that these transgender activists are misreading the people who they use as authorities. They're misreading Judith Butler and misreading Foucault. It's a sort of simple popularised and misreading version of theory. If you are interested in that, just buy the book.

Charlie D: My name's Charlie. I'm originally a human biologist. I've never written a book, but I did a really good tweet this year.

And I guess what was unexpected about that tweet was how many people would get in contact with me about their experiences of detransitioning. So yeah, this month I launched the Detransition Advocacy Network 

I worry that, I think you might have covered sort of everything that I wanted to say, but I am that kid in a lot of ways. I'm that kid that you've been sort of talking about, almost like hypothetically. So sorry, I'm reading off a laptop because I can't remember stuff.

So my story went viral a couple of months ago. In a moment of euphoria, after spending the day with new feminist friends, I shared my experience of being inside the transgender movement. In brief, for those that missed a really good tweet, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria as a teenager, and then socially transitioned. I bound my breasts, changed my paperwork, changed my pronouns, and it didn't help. The hatred for my body grew a lot worse, and eventually after years I desisted. 

My experience has been shared a lot the last few months, but it's only part of the story. Since sharing it, my inbox has been flooded with other stories of young women who are also told their bodies somehow didn't match their brain.

Usually young women and usually lesbians, usually gender nonconforming in their mid-twenties and often autistic, they describe their mental state that they have been in when they made the choice to surgically transition. They often describe it as not a choice at all. Women battling with eating disorders, depression, anxiety, sexual trauma. Again and again and again these stories have come in their absolute hundreds.

It's easy for me to speak out. So I do. I'm relatively unscathed from it all. I don't have to live with the side effects of invasive surgery on my body, and I'm confident enough and stable enough that I've managed to find my own voice amongst the chaos.

This isn't true for most de-transitioners. The horrible irony of gender dysphoria is that it disproportionately attacks those of us who are autistic and those of us whose anxiety holds us back from being part of these conversations. 

I've come here today not to talk about my story again, but to tell you the rest of the story. To give a voice to those women who have suffered at the hands of gender identity, but can't speak here about their experiences.

I don't claim to speak for all of us, but perhaps I can pass on some of their stories. 

I'd first like to address something important. When you listen to the voices of detransitioners and the desisters, you'll notice that many of us, maybe most of us, are critical of the idea of gender identity. The idea that everyone has an innate feeling of being a man, a woman, or both or either or half of a bit or a quarter of a bit.

Understandably, we recognise the flaws in this sort of ideology first hand. We recognize that we live in such a gendered world that of course, the little girl that loves sports and trucks and football shirts, the little girl with crop short hair and muddy jeans, the little girl that hates dresses and pink and glitter and princesses is never going to feel like a girl. I think we've covered the rest of that paragraph, so I'm just going to skip it. 

But living with gender dysphoria is difficult. To give you a sense of how it feels, it can be thought of as a sort of gremlin shouting at you that your body is wrong. The gender dysphoria gremlin is really loud. It can overpower your other inner voices where illogical and kind inner voice might say, ‘you look really smart today in that new tweed you just got’ but the gender dysphoria gremlin sitting on your shoulder might say, ‘you look disgusting. You look like a girl. You need to bind your breasts tighter.’

In this way gender dysphoria is much like other conditions focused around the way we see our body. However, where gender dysphoria is not like other conditions which affect the way we see our body, it's the way that it’s treated.

Do they have a gold standard treatment for a gremlin like this? Is a double mastectomy and hysterectomy, sometimes fashioning a prosthetic phallus from the tissue of a woman's forearm? Sorry, this talk gets a bit bleak. 

The reason we treat gender dysphoria like this comes from promoting the concept that the gender dysphoria gremlin is correct. That its angry little voice is a reflection, that there actually is something wrong with your body, that there is some sort of mismatch.

The current mainstream view is that gender dysphonia is caused by the essence of a male or female having got muddled up and somehow stuck in the wrong body. This belief would mean that each sex must act, feel, and behave a specific way. And if the wrong essence is inside that body, then their bodies can be corrected to fix it.

Many of the detransitioners reject this idea. Instead, we see our dysphoria as the problem and not our body. Gender dysphoria remains the only condition that affects your mind that we can continue to treat by changing the body. Well intended but damaging dangerous public health policy is something we've seen before in history.

The lobotomy, the procedure of digging an ice pick into the brain to remove random chunks. We forget now, but it was government funded. It was encouraged. It was progressive. It was a miracle cure. The surgeon that pioneered the lobotomy won the Nobel prize. It's approximated that only a third of the patient subjected to it actually benefited another third were unaffected and a further third were worse off afterwards. 

This is more data than we have on surgically treating gender dysphoria.

 In a decade since its abolishment, it has been described as one of the most spectacular failures in the history of medicine. In another a hundred years it won't just be lobotomy listed in the history books under that chapter. 

One day, we will look horrified that we had ever considered gender nonconformity and self-hatred as a symptom women had in born in the wrong body.

Women who detransition are often described as people who were just experimenting with gender, who happened to realise that they were not trans men. From the messages I've received from detransitioners over the last few months, this isn't accurate. Time and time again, they tell me that surgical transition did not help their dysphoria or it made their dysphoria worse.

They realised that even with all of these surgeries, they could not actually physically change sex and overwhelming they realised that their desire for surgical transition comes from a place of serious trauma, abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, cosmetic surgery does not heal this. For many people with gender dysphoria, the effects of such trauma rears its head years later. 

The first time my eyes were opened to just how terrifying the extent gender identity is hurting young women and girls was a phone call from a young German woman. She had her gender reassignment surgeries in quick succession at the age of 21. She's now 23. She had four surgeries in less than three months. 

She described the hospital in Germany, Berlin, where she had been treated. An entire wing dedicated to female to male sex changes. She described the atmosphere as: sterile walls, harsh, bright lighting, neatly arranged beds lined up on either side of the room, draped with white sheets. Inside every bed a young woman with blood stained bandages wrapped around her breasts. Others waking up from the anaesthetic to realise some of their organs are lying in a medical bin while nurses walk around serving tea and telling everyone what brave boys they've been. Such brave boys, brave boys on their way to their authentic self, such brave boys. It sounds post-apocalyptic. 

Her story isn't the only one that has shaken me. I'd like to read some parts of the stories of the women that have contacted me over the last few months as they reflect on this experience. 

‘The idea I was born with a male brain was terrifying. I was told that without transition, there was a high chance I would kill myself. It is very hard to except that parts of my body got changed, removed, rearranged by an outside force for no other reason than a deep self-hatred. Perhaps there needs to be another treatment for gender dysphoria other than altering the person's body to help their mind. Transition is a way to make the gender nonconforming conform. Are you masculine in a female body? Reject your body, then you are masculine with a male body, all fixed. I feel like my life got taken away. I've lost so much to this illness and the way it got enabled.’ 

She's referring to anorexia.

‘I don't regret a sex change. I regret falling for the lie that amputation and sterilisation are a sex change. There were no words for me to express how horrifying it is that a medical professional agreed to remove healthy organs from my body based on the delusional belief that I'm actually a man and should never have had them to begin with.’ 

One of the common themes we discuss in detrans groups and a theme that you might have already identified in those excerpts is the issue of consent.

If a woman has reached such a low point in her mental health, can she really consent to a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy? Surely no mentally sound person would want the removal of healthy organs and healthy tissue. 

We also talk about data a lot, particularly me with the science background bit. Detransitioners have been let down by the scientific and medical communities. Because we rarely talk about gender dysphoria being a condition that needs treatment, we rarely discuss the gaps in the data. 

One of the most prominent gaps is that there are no real studies comparing surgical versus non-surgical long-term treatment options. We also have no way to report detransition, which also means that trans suicide statistics are unable to identify us. Could people be losing their lives because dysphoria was not being eased by medical transition. 

This is a problem. It means we do not know how successful the current ways of treatment dysphoria are at all. It is criminal that there has been such a lack of research into ways to treat this illness. Surely when faced with the choice between changing the bodies as a gender nonconforming to fit society and changing society to fit the gender nonconforming, we should be supporting the latter.

So where are the studies? Where is the research? Where is any attempt to find non-surgical help for us? If we can find ways to treat gender dysphoria and help people live their lives that don't involve sterility, loss of sexual function, major surgeries and hormones, we should celebrate this treatment. If the desistance rate of trans children is around 2% to 85%, a wide estimate because there are no studies that are good enough to determine the number for certain, we should be working to increase this level of desistance.

Instead, this is called conversion therapy somehow. The people who criticise that have one thing in mind. Gay conversion is still thriving in the 21st century. The conversion therapy of today is the prescription of cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, and hysterectomies as treatment for girls and women who do not conform.

I don't want to end this talk on a negative note. For many detransitioned women, the past has been bleak, but we are focused on the future. This month I launched the Detransition Advocacy Network, the first charity to acknowledge and support detransitioners and allocate funds to their health and legal needs.

We will fight for our voices to be heard, we'll fight the ideology that teaches gender nonconforming girls, that there is something wrong with them, and we will fight for a future that works to understand this illness and the damage that is being caused by the current treatment model.