Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce, interviewed at Spiked, on the dangers of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones:

There are some very real dangers for young children who are dissociating from their bodies. Going through puberty is distressing enough as it is, but it’s doubly distressing for children who dissociate from their bodies in this way. This might mean they’re not able to understand what their bodies are telling them or whether they’re attracted to certain people. If they receive hormone therapy as well, the consequences are catastrophic.

This is true for both sexes, but more so for girls. Quite simply, testosterone is a hell of a drug. It does a whole load of things to the body that are irreversible. I could grow a beard if I took testosterone. However, if a man took oestrogen, it wouldn’t make his beard stop growing. For something like hair follicles, once they have been switched on, that’s it. You can’t switch them off….

Testosterone is also terrible for female sex organs. It causes the vaginal lining and uterus to atrophy. Women who are on testosterone for more than a few years are eventually going to have to get their sex organs removed – which means they will be sterilised. However, oestrogen doesn’t really undo the things that testosterone does. Cross-sex hormones do far more damage to girls’ bodies than they do to boys.

There is a push to try to start male transition earlier or to block their puberty so they never go through testosterone-driven changes. But people are now realising that all of these interventions are very bad for a developing person. Taking what are euphemistically called ‘puberty blockers’ affects a child’s bones, brain and sexual organs irreversibly. It also affects future fertility and sex drive. If you stop all the natural processes that are supposed to mature a person during puberty, it will be disastrous….

How are you meant to know whether you’re gay or straight if you block puberty? By definition, gay people are more gender-nonconforming. This is because being attracted to someone of the same sex is gender-nonconforming. Research shows that people who are very notably gender-nonconforming in early youth often grow up to be gay. Of course, it’s more nuanced than that, because there are lots of little boys who want to play with dolls and are straight. But statistically speaking, if you’re very gender-nonconforming pre-puberty, you’re something like 20-times more likely to grow up gay.

These boys are now the people who are being told they’re probably girls. I think this is kind of a modern gay conversion therapy. They’re turning proto-gay boys into sterile facsimiles of straight girls.

Which is, interestingly enough, what happens in Iran. The BBC from 2014 (not sure they'd publish this now):

Iran is one of a handful of countries where homosexual acts are punishable by death. Clerics do, however accept the idea that a person may be trapped in a body of the wrong sex. So homosexuals can be pushed into having gender reassignment surgery – and to avoid it many flee the country.

Something of a paradox, then – progressives cheering on the policies of a violently homophobic misogynist theocratic regime. Then again, seeing as many are out marching most weekends in support of the Iran-backed Islamist proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah, maybe it's not so strange after all.