Mick Hartley

Philosophy professor Kathleen Stock – whose book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism – was published in May – is interviewed by Genevieve Gluck. It's quite long, but worth reading in full. An extract, on gender identity:

I think what’s going on is a kind of “just-so story,” I’m afraid. It validates the story about adults. That story is that you have a gender identity, which is innate, bursting out of you at a certain point, which cannot be suppressed or denied and should always be affirmed. That’s a story being told about adults and I really criticize that view very heavily in my book. But in order to validate that story, children are now being described as having gender identities and [we are told] we can tell by what they say. If they say I think I’m a boy — or even in some extreme cases, they exhibit sex non-conforming behavior — their parents can determine that they must be really a girl, or a boy, in a way that doesn’t match their bodies.

That’s a very disturbing aspect of this whole construction. As Heather Brunskell-Evans would say, the construction of the trans child is used to prop up the fictions — the backstories — of adults. It’s not that I don’t think there are children who have body dysphoria or dysphoria about their sex — it’s not that I don’t recognize that, I absolutely do. But to say that they have an inner gender identity, which is authentically them, is a particular interpretation of what they’re experiencing and I think it’s the wrong one.

Puberty blockers have been introduced in a completely irresponsible way in the UK. They’ve been presented in this horrible metaphor of “pressing pause on puberty,” as in stopping the development of post-pubescent sexual characteristics. But the body is not a CD player, and it turns out that the long-term effects of these [drugs] on the body are poorly understood. What science we have, including on bone density, isn’t good. Another thing that needs to be understood is that they stop the regular development of the sex organs. If children go from puberty blockers straight onto cross-sex hormones, which is happening in many cases, then they just won’t have normal sexual function, some of them, for life. This is something that is happening to them before they potentially understand what sexual function is.

It’s turning out that a lot of children, relatively speaking, with gender identity disorders — or gender dysphoria, or whatever you want to call it — are autistic. A lot of them are same-sex attracted. Being autistic means that you quite often have a delay in your ability to categorize things in the world flexibly. It makes sense, then, that you might have problems mapping biology onto identity. Then there’s also trauma in many of these children’s backgrounds which is not being properly looked at because of this narrative that says an authentic gender identity is making itself known through their behavior and speech. It’s incredibly worrying to me, and scandalous that the medical profession on the whole has mindlessly adopted the mantras. Obviously there are honourable exceptions everywhere but there is a whole lot of thoughtless behavior going on on the part of medics, endocrinologists, and psychologists.

Pushed all the way by pressure groups like Stonewall and Mermaids.