Mick Hartley

Harry de Quetteville in the Telegraph – Why teenage girls are on the front line of the trans war:

Across the country, if parental testimonials gathered on the Free to Speak website are to be believed, something profound is occurring in schools under the banner of tolerance and inclusivity. Children are being encouraged to challenge their fundamental biology, to question their sex and the deepest assumptions they have made about their identities. It can be the beginning of a journey leading ultimately to irreversible sex-change surgery. And it is adolescent girls who are most affected.

As one account by Julie, 14, puts it: “Controversial gender ideology has taken over my school. There’s been a rapidly increasing number of teenagers ‘coming out’ as ‘transgender’, entire friend groups suddenly emerging as ‘Non-Binary’ or ‘Gender-Queer’.” Julie describes the phenomenon as a “social contagion”. Teachers, she adds, “are basically encouraging it. Lessons feel more like political activism than education.” Flags in the school hallways bear the mottos “Demiboy” “Asexual” “Non-Binary” and “Polysexual”. Adopting a new “gender identity” is popular in every sense. One girl who “switched her pronouns to he/him, stopped using the girl’s changing rooms and changed her name … and is now essentially a school celebrity. Girls left and right are saying they’re transgender.”

David Bell is familiar with these sorts of accounts. He is the eminent psychiatrist who wrote the whistleblowing report that ultimately resulted in the Tavistock NHS trust’s controversial Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) being shut down. He worries that “transgender” is a term far too easily used to describe confused adolescents – a simplistic label that “forecloses” debate about what children are experiencing, offering a single comforting explanation for “multiple and complex problems”. “One shouldn’t talk about transgender children,” he says….

The numbers speak for the profound nature of this development. In 2009-10, when just 77 people were referred to the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service, those born male outnumbered females by 56 per cent to 44 per cent. A decade later, 74 per cent of those referred were born female. Over the past five years, referrals of young women have increased at twice the rate of men. That has driven a huge growth in referrals. In 2021-22 the NHS reported more than 5,000 referrals to GIDS, up 64-fold in just over a decade.

To some parents, such a dramatic rise in young girls seeking treatment which could ultimately lead to irreversible sex-change surgery requires explaining. “The patient cohort is basically 15-year-old girls and that’s brand new,” says a spokesman from the For Women Scotland campaign group. “We don’t know why. No one knows.” Bell has his suspicions. “It must be clear,” he writes in his 2020 essay, First, Do No Harm, “that such a rapid escalation of cases, the increase in natal females … cannot be explained by individual factors alone, nor is it likely to be caused by a large number of individuals feeling free to ‘come out’ in this new ‘liberal’ atmosphere. It must be derived from socio-cultural forces.” Forces which, on the face of it, appear to have taken a grip at many schools….

As Joanna Williams, founder and director of the think tank CIEO, notes: “From early in childhood, children are encouraged to think about gender as something quite distinct from biology.” PSHE lessons can introduce children as young as eight to the terms “cisgender, transgender, sexual orientation, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, gender expression, biological sex, intersex, non-binary, gender fluid, pronouns, transition, gender dysphoria, questioning and queer.” By the age of 10, some children are expected to “know about gender identities and have an awareness of transgender issues”. In all, Williams notes, “a highly political agenda is being promoted to a captive audience” with “children being indoctrinated into a one-sided and controversial view of gender when they are too young to challenge what they are hearing and lack the capacity simply to walk away.” … Among girls, in particular, such policies can be the background to “outbreaks” of gender questioning, ripping through social groups. “Even in Freud’s day it was known that sometimes one girl had a fit, the next day there were 20 girls with fits,” says Bell. “We don’t know why. We do know it’s much more common in girls. Social contagion is very important. People treating them haven’t recognised that. You see epidemics of gender dysphoria [which he defines as a ‘very painful disturbance in relation to their sexual body’].”

For Charlie Bentley-Astor, who bound her breasts as a “transgender” teenager, such “contagion” is all too familiar. “Girls want to fit in more than boys,” she says. “You take on the emotions of the person you are with; as soon as you do that, these things spread.” In the past, schools have had to deal with outbreaks of eating disorders, spreading from girl to girl. Since the beginning of this century, online interest in “anorexia” has declined even as searches for “transgender” increased, with the latter overtaking the former in 2015, just as the explosion in girls’ gender identity referrals got under way. “Transgender is definitely this generation’s anorexia,” says Bentley-Astor….

Unfortunately the response to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria hasn't been anywhere near as uniformly negative as it has been to anorexia. Anorexics are clearly delusional and are clearly doing serious damage to themselves. The same of course can be said for teen girl transitioners, but the damage isn't so immediately obvious – we'll see more of that when more detransitioners grow up to tell their stories – and much of the medical profession has been disgracefully complicit in the harm done. Plus it's all backed by a whole ideology of gender identity which bills itself as progressive and has sucked in academics and intellectuals and all manner of grim autogynephile hangers-on…