Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce at The Critic. What madness have we just come through?

Diane Ehrensaft, an influential psychologist based in San Francisco, has said that toddlers can send non-verbal “gender messages”. A baby boy may signal a female identity by unpopping his onesie to mimic a dress, or a baby girl may rip out a hairclip to indicate she is really a boy. Ehrensaft has advised parents of children as young as three to “affirm” their gender identities — that is, to lie to them and everyone else about their sex.

Now it’s all starting to unravel, and we’re left with clearing up the mess.

Many will have to navigate regret alone. Gender-affirming therapists routinely recommend cutting off friends and relatives who are insufficiently ecstatic about trans identification; trans community groups cast out detransitioners like apostates.

Detransitioners can expect nothing from the teachers who socially transitioned them as children behind parents’ backs, the trans evangelists who promised a new “glitter family” to replace the one they abandoned, or the clinicians who guilt-tripped parents with false claims about transition being “life-saving”.…

But soon enough, trans-identifying people will have to face up to the fact that they never had the right most of them took for granted to use spaces and services for the opposite sex. It seems plausible that continuing to identify as trans will be less appealing without the guarantee that others will be forced to play along.

Detransitioners will need specialist counselling to cope with a new, medically created form of grief and loss. Those who took cross-sex hormones or removed their genitals will need new medical protocols. Endocrinologists will have to work out if and when to recommend stopping cross-sex hormones, and how best to support people who no longer have testicles or ovaries. Detransitioners whose urinary tracts have been damaged by hormones and surgery will need help coping with infections and incontinence as they age.

And later still care homes will have to learn how to handle dementia patients distressed by being unable to remember why their genitals are missing, or to understand why carers are referring to them as the sex they are not. Desires may be fickle and fleeting, but still have lifelong consequences.