Puberty Blockers or Suicide?

To learn what a fox has to do with this post, please read to the end.

If someone asserts they are ‘transgender’, a question that might follow is, ‘Are you thinking of transitioning?’

What does it mean to be transgender, and if you think you are, how do you know? Well, you just know, or think you do, and nobody else can tell you whether you are or not – no brain scan or blood test will be of the slightest help to provide a definitive answer. Thus, doctors or ‘specialists’ working in so-called gender clinics can’t make a judgement on this question for you. But if you consult such a clinic, the implication is that the question has already been decided in the affirmative. There’s only one treatment that’s offered and it’s called, indeed, ‘affirmative care’. In other words, to consult a gender clinic implies a decision to treat accordingly.

It seems gender clinics never say, ‘You’re not transgender – you’re just a mixed-up kid. So go away and sort yourself out, and then come back if you still think affirmative care is what you need.’ Thus, it’s the patient who makes the diagnosis and decides the treatment, since treatment for being transgender, if requested, means bodily alterations with puberty blockers, often followed by sex hormones, and possibly surgical mutilations as well.

If a child or young person thinks he or she may be transgender, it’s impossible for anyone else to determine whether this is true or not. Only you know your own mind. And if you’re in doubt, then you’re in doubt. You don’t have to do anything, other than just get on with your life.

Ah, but the transgender ideologues will assert that if you haven’t yet gone through puberty and you miss the opportunity of taking a puberty blocker before puberty gets under way, then you will have lost the chance of preventing the unwanted type of puberty and will end up with physical features of the sex you don’t wish to be. That’s right, this is what will happen. One has to put up with many things in life you don’t want or wish hadn’t happened.

What the affirmative care proponents don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to change your sex. The best, or as one might more accurately say, the worst, that can happen is that to a certain extent you may acquire the external appearance of the opposite sex. Whom are you trying to fool? Yourself, while gazing admiringly in a mirror or as you take a selfie, or other people?

Whereas it’s true that some people who have undergone ‘transition’ with hormones and surgery may present a convincing appearance, when clothed, of the opposite sex, what’s the good of that? The naked body doesn’t lie. Even if, as a girl who has transitioned, so that she – I’ll use the original pronouns to avoid confusion – presents to the world with a beard, big muscles, a chest scar where her breasts used to be, and an artificial ‘crotch bulge’, what’s the point? So that she can feel better about herself by pretending to be man? She will lack a penis, testes, prostate gland, and seminal vesicles, and thus will be incapable of impregnating a woman. She might retain her vagina, uterus, and ovaries so could in theory become pregnant – ‘the pregnant man’ – but how much simpler it would be if she wants to become pregnant if she retains her normal anatomy and female functions undisturbed by male hormone administration!

Or a boy may submit to female sex hormone administration in an attempt to achieve feminine facial contours and body fat distribution, in the process losing his beard and body hair, and growing breasts. He may go the extreme of being castrated, having his scrotum fashioned into an ersatz vulva, and having an artificial opening made in front of his rectum. But obviously, lacking a normal vagina, Fallopian tubes, ovaries, and a uterus, he will be infertile. And what’s the point of having an artificial vagina? So that another man who likes that sort of thing can masturbate into it? Some men contemplating these mutilations may go to the extreme of sperm preservation so that at a later date the specimen can be unfrozen and used for in vitro fertilisation. But how much simpler it would be to attempt a pregnancy in the normal way!

In no other branch of medicine, in physically normal people, are bodily alterations brought about through abnormal hormone administration or surgery. Yet this is what it is proposed should be done in transgender people who wish it, when the so-called disorder exists only in the mind. But it’s even more complicated than that, because if we are to believe the transgender proponents, being transgender is not even a disorder. What is it then? Is it normal, or a variation of normal? If so, why does it need medical intervention?

‘It’s a Cass-tastrophe!’ reads the punning and insulting title of a recent blog put up by Dr Helen Webberley on her GenderGP website. This is an abusive and libellous attack on Dr Hillary Cass, whose Review is called ‘infamous’ and a ‘betrayal’. It goes on:

Dr Cass will have blood on her hands, she has failed to follow the world experts’ advice on how best to help this patient group, and instead she has made recommendations that are resulting in their death. Young death. Tragic death.

In support of these extraordinary allegations, Dr Webberley quotes a statement on Twitter (formerly X) put up by the contemptible British barrister, a self-confessed fox killer, Jolyon Maugham, as follows:

I have now seen further evidence that, since the Bell decision in the High Court (1 December 2020), there has been a huge increase in deaths of young trans people on the NHS waiting list – and that NHS management has sought to suppress that evidence.

Unfortunately, Mr Maugham neglects to tell us the source of the evidence to which he refers. Nonetheless, if he is to be believed, the way to prevent suicide in children and adolescents confused about their gender, is to castrate the boys and remove the girls’ breasts!

Could Dr Webberley’s assertions just be a tiny bit self-serving?

Text © Gabriel Symonds

Picture credit: Alexander Andrews on Unsplash