Mick Hartley

The latest issue of Private Eye out today, no. 1592, has a review of the Hannah Barnes book Time to Think, about the Tavistock scandal:

It's a fair enough review (and yes, a clever title, "Agenda Clinic"), but there's one line that bothers me: "If you've been following the debate over "trans kids" – a loaded term, since no one can reliably distinguish between, say, a future butch lesbian and trans boy…"

That implies that there is such a thing as a trans boy: that it might well turn out – who knows? – that a young girl was indeed born in the wrong body, and is "really" a boy. In that case the Tavistock Clinic has been acting on the right lines, though perhaps a little carelessly, and those trans activists who claim that affirmation is the only correct approach if we want to avoid ruining a young person's chance of happiness are wrong only in that this may not always be the case.

Sorry but…no.

No one is born in the wrong body. It's a senseless claim. Gender dysphoria was, twenty years ago, an extremely rare affliction, and even then it was mostly men wanting to be women. What we're dealing with here is a social contagion – so-called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. Female puberty is hard enough at the best of times, but in our hyper-sexualised culture where social media rule it must be some kind of nightmare for troubled young girls. Yes, gay and autistic children predominated in the Tavistock's grim intake, but as for genuine trans boys…no. There's no such thing.