Mick Hartley

There's nothing new about girls who reject puberty, appalled at the sudden changes in their bodies and horrified at the prospect of becoming an object of unwanted male attention. The strategy of choice used to be anorexia: now it's gender reassignment. At The Critic, Victoria Smith – who went through anorexia herself – attacks this absurd and dangerous idea now spread by trans activists that puberty is somehow optional. Quite apart from the irreversible damage to the bodies of these misguided young girls lurks the assumption that if you do go ahead with puberty then you're in a way consenting to becoming a women-as-sex-object:

By positioning puberty as something to which one should “consent’, misguided feminists and LGBTQ+ activists repackage the same lies predatory men have always told about the pubescent girl. If she wasn’t happy with slowly morphing from child to sex object to Stepford wife, she wouldn’t have agreed to go through the ultimate human-to-object rite of passage. If she didn’t see herself as a prime cut on the patriarchal meat market, she’d have stayed small forever. If she didn’t want her tits grabbed, she wouldn’t have grown them.

The conflation of a healthy, developed female body with, at best, surrendered heterosexuality, at worst, fetishised non-personhood, is a form of victim blaming. It repositions adolescent girls as volunteers rather than conscripts in a battle against their own subjectivity. Those opting out, with their binders and blockers, can disdain the normies the same way I used to in the PE changing rooms, allowing their assumptions about “mere” females, those apparent ignoramuses when it comes to challenging “the gender binary system”, to run riot…

Conversations about gender identity and puberty suppression revolve around the inner lives of trans-identified individuals. That we’re not so interested in the girls who stick with their female bodies, braving the patriarchal storm, is testimony to the very belittlement that others flee. The ascription of “cisness” (that imaginary state of identifying with the sex role stereotypes imposed on one because of one’s sex) sanitises the idea that adolescent girls don’t care what the world throws at them. If those basic cis bitches didn’t want to be objectified, they’d have put it away, “it” now being their growth, their health, their entire female presence.

A feminism that cannot even embrace the idea of all girls growing into adult human females — that perceives such growth only through the patriarchal gaze, as a fixing in place as heterosexual sex object/gestational vessel — is in serious trouble….

The opt-outs might think, as I did, that their gender non-conformity is more authentic because it is paid for in physical sacrifice. It’s time we realised the real gender non-conformists are the girls — and that’s most girls — who refuse to accept stunted growth as the price of their personhood.