Mick Hartley

Julie Bindel in the Sun:

Sinead Watson, is a bright, humorous woman who speaks her mind and has a permanent twinkle in her eyes. But just over a decade ago, 33-year-old Sinead temporarily became Sean, a surly, angry trans man.

At the age of 20, feeling desperately unhappy, and suffering trauma from serious sexual assaults perpetrated by men, she discovered online trans communities.

Sinead convinced herself that all of her problems would disappear if she underwent gender reassignment treatment.

Then, at 23 — having presented as “gender dysphoric” at the Sandyford Gender Clinic in Glasgow — Sinead was able to transition to a trans man with little pushback.

But within five years of her first appointment she was “deeply regretting” her decision and, aged 27, began living as a woman again.

Today, Sinead is in permanent pain and discomfort as a result of taking the male hormone ­testosterone, and has scars where her breasts used to be.

She has been living in a homeless hostel for the past six months after the breakdown of a three-year relationship, and has struggled with alcoholism.

Sinead tells me: “I’m currently single. My relationship was in tatters because I couldn’t cope with all the trauma in my life.”

Sinead is angry at the professionals at Sandyford, who she claims led her to believe she could escape her female body.

She says: “I now must live with the many permanent consequences of the ‘treatment’ I received there.

“I realised I had made a terrible mistake when I woke up after my double mastectomy.

“By then I had grown a beard, and my voice had deepened as a result of the testosterone I’d taken. I felt there was no going back.”…

She explains: “When I was seen by gender clinicians, I was allowed to make a monumental, life-changing decision but I wasn’t offered in-depth counselling. Instead, I was effectively left to self-diagnose.

“What I clearly needed was therapy. I had been the victim of sexual abuse and I told them, ‘I’m just out of psychiatric hospital. I’ve been suicidal. I have all these issues’.

“What they should have said is, ‘Let’s talk about how you ended up there’.

“But they didn’t ask me any questions about my ­history of trauma and abuse.

“If they had told me, ‘You’ve had some terrible experiences relating to men sexualising you because of your breasts, but there’s nothing wrong with them,’ I may not have felt the need to have them cut off.”

Instead, they affirmed Sinead immediately at her first appointment, calling out her name to see the ­clinician: “He’s ready for you, Mr Watson.”..

After Sinead broke down in front of her GP, she was finally referred to a therapist. She says: “When I said I regretted my transition, they suggested that I was perhaps non-binary. It was ­dizzying.

“I felt ready to kill myself. But I couldn’t put my loved ones through any more, so I decided to go online and find other detransitioned women.

“I found a surprisingly large ­number of them. And then they told me their stories.

“I basically went from being ­horrifically depressed and suicidal to so, so angry”.

Most of the detransitioners Sinead is in contact with are in their early 20s.

There's quite some way to go before we get the full measure of the lives destroyed by the gender cult, and its extraordinary success in getting young people mutilated in the fantastical belief that people can be "born in the wrong body".

[Bindel – "Anyone bleating about "why did you write this for the Sun?" complain to the Guardian please."]