Mick Hartley

Fired from his job because he voiced concerns about troubled young people being encouraged to mutilate their bodies. James Esses – ‘I questioned why children were being encouraged to transition – and it cost me my dream career’:

Until he joined Childline in 2016, he’d never much engaged with the notion of gender dysphoria – feeling trapped in the wrong body. But the rise in those calls “set something off in my mind”, he remembers. Esses began reading books and academic papers on the subject, wanting to better understand how to help. “Once I began reading, I began to get extremely concerned with the medical pathways that we were putting very, very young children on,” he says. The children on the other end of the line “were so young that they weren’t even able to really verbalise to me what exactly it meant to be a man or a woman” – yet they told Esses they wanted to take puberty blockers and hormones, wear breast binders and have sex reassignment surgery.

Concerned, Esses raised the issue internally, perturbed too by the influence of Stonewall – the charity brought in by many organisations in the name of equality – whose posters in counselling rooms suggested “an ideological message around gender”, and Childline’s website, where he describes the page on gender identity as a “roadmap towards medical transitioning”. It also features a video from individuals who have transitioned, who are “basically selling it to young people… [with] no mention of de-transitioners and the significant risks and potential permanent scars that might come from those who regret [it]”.

He spoke with senior management, yet nothing changed. As his online advocacy around safeguarding continued, he was told not to refer to the charity or his role there. In July, Esses received a call dismissing him with immediate effect. “I was distraught,” he reflects, at “the most important thing in my life” – which had inspired his decision to leave law and train as a psychotherapist – going “up in smoke almost overnight”.

No independence of thought allowed. Trans dogma must be followed, even if it is at the expense of all those irreversibly damaged children.

If anything, going public has only fortified his stance: he has been inundated with messages from anguished parents who, in one case, had found correspondence from Mermaids, the transgender charity, promising to send breast binders to their child behind their back. (Mermaids did not respond to requests for comment.) De-transitioners, who have taken puberty-blocking medication and been left infertile, or “permanently disfigured and scarred,” have also been in touch to show their support.

It seems mind-boggling that someone could be ejected from much-needed counselling work and therapy training for questioning how best to help vulnerable children; that Esses now spends his days fielding messages from peers who share his views, yet are too frightened to speak out. But the “‘trans’ topic is the issue of our time”, Esses now realises, one where an “affirmation mindset” has taken hold and any deviation results in career combustion like his own.

Part of the problem is in schools, where he has heard many cases where “children at a very young age are being taught that sex was assigned at birth, which is factually inaccurate”. Social media – in which people can find confirmation bias in corners of the internet – also plays a part. As, he thinks, does the language used by organisations such as Mermaids who tell children that “family isn’t blood” – “very, very alienating [and] isolating” phrasing designed to “drive young people further and further away” from loved ones who might challenge their point of view. If children are left to develop unencumbered, Esses says, “given time, given exploratory therapy, most of them settle into themselves and settle into their bodies”.

At some point in the future there's going to be some serious reckoning about all these ruined lives.