Mick Hartley

I posted about therapists Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano and Stella O’Malley's new book When Kids Say They’re Trans last week. In today's Sunday Times Sarah Ditum reviews it alongside The T in LGBT+ by Jamie Raines.

Before I wrote this review, I looked up both titles on Amazon. Jamie Raines — a 29-year-old trans man who makes YouTube videos aimed at young trans people — had a near-clean sweep of five-star ratings: “amazing”, “brilliant”, “thank you for speaking the truth”.

Meanwhile, When Kids Say They’re Trans had been deluged with negative reviews calling it “dangerous” and “bigoted”. Very strange, since the book hadn’t even been published at the time. Even stranger if you’ve read the book, which is compassionate and measured, and urges parents to accept their children’s decision to transition, if that’s what they eventually choose.

Worse than that: it's described by one reviewer as "a DIY child torture manual in disguise".

But this is the fraught, angry world of trans activism, where, in my experience, any questioning viewpoint must be crushed. Raines represents the “affirmative” camp: the idea that when a child says they are not their birth sex, they should be automatically believed and supported. Trans girls are girls, trans boys are boys, and nonbinary children are nonbinary, whatever that means in practice.

Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano and Stella O’Malley — three mental health professionals who have collaborated to write When Kids Say They’re Trans — take a different approach. “We don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘trans child’,” they write. For them, gender distress is a real phenomenon but a complex one, through which a child might be expressing any number of needs related to their inner life or their relationship to their family.

This would not be a controversial approach to take in any other area of child development. It should be obvious to anyone who has been a teenager that, as Ayad et al write, “adolescents are on a rollercoaster journey of self-exploration, angst and change”. Something you are certain of at 14 or 16 may have little relationship to the person you are at 21 or 30.

Yet when you apply this banal observation to the issue of gender, you will immediately be cast as a malignant transphobe in some quarters. The authors of When Kids Say They’re Trans know this, and their aim in this book is to offer an alternative toolkit for parents of gender-distressed children when most of the available resources push families towards transition.

Raines’s book shows what such parents are up against. It’s chatty, accessible — and utterly glib about what transition entails. It’s clearly aimed at a child readership: it’s interspersed with cartoons and includes frequent interjections such as “haha” when Raines attempts a joke. If Ayad et al believe there’s no such thing as a trans child, Raines appears to believe there’s no such thing as a child who says they are trans who is mistaken. The book doesn’t even consider the possibility that the young reader could be ill served by a trans identity.

Nor does it explore the implications of the fact that Raines’s partner is a woman from a conservative Muslim background whose family used “lesbian” as an insult before Raines transitioned. (Only a transphobe, apparently, would think homophobia played any part in transition.) Instead, Raines jumps directly into educating teenagers about what being trans involves.

Ditum herself doesn't explore the implications either. Basically, in a strict Muslim society like Iran where homosexuality is demonised, castration of young gay men is encouraged so that they can live as women, and the horror of having a gay son doesn't have to be faced: not dissimilar, you may think, to the story of Mermaids former CEO  Susie Green and her voyage to Thailand to have her son castrated and "transitioned" on his sixteenth birthday, after the father expressed disapproval of the young lad's effeminate ways.

“Top surgery” — double mastectomy of healthy tissue to achieve a flat, masculine appearance — is represented with an illustration of a crossed-out binder (the restrictive garment used to compress unwanted breasts). It’s a trivialising way to represent a major operation. Later on, Raines quotes a joke about “titties” being something you have removed like braces. “Haha” indeed.

He does give some house room to the fact that transition has complications (Raines’s own “bottom surgery” — an operation to make the clitoris appear like a micropenis — was difficult). But at no point does he suggest that any of these complications may be too high a price to pay for your gender journey. In fact, the opposing viewpoint gets short shrift from Raines. In a “mythbusting” section, we are informed that “in all this time, there has been no evidence that trans women have been a threat to cis [ie natal] women”. This is simply false: Isla Bryson and Karen White are only the two most prominent examples of male-to-female transitioners who have committed violence against women. But reality cannot impinge on Raines’s politics.

I can guess which book will be featured prominently on display in Waterstones, and which will be impossible to find.