Mick Hartley

With the latest Girlguiding affair in mind, Victoria Smith lays it out in The Critic – The costs of telling the truth too late:

Imagine you are a child who really, really hates being a boy. You despise your sexed body, feel alienated from it, dread the thought of becoming a man. You don’t yet know the difference between masculinity and maleness, that accepting your sex need not be the same as conforming to rigid norms. To learn this you need love and support from the adults around you. But imagine if, rather than offer it, all of these adults kept saying “yes, you must be a girl – and anyone claiming otherwise must want you dead”. 

Imagine if they told you that your interest in  “feminine” things proved, not the arbitrariness of gender stereotypes, but that you were born in the wrong body. Imagine if they claimed that with the right medication and surgery, you could avoid puberty and ultimately change sex. Imagine if they said that access to the language, resources and spaces of the opposite sex was not only your birthright, but that anyone who sought to deny you this must hate you. Imagine if they insisted that untold numbers of people — priests, feminists, left-wingers, right-wingers, grannies, famous children’s authors — were plotting your demise every time they suggested your body was not the problem. 

If it was your mum doing this — backed up by teachers, medical professionals and other trusted folk — you’d believe her. Not just because she was validating your own anxieties, but because these would be insane claims to make if they weren’t true. No loving parent would tell a child they could literally change sex — or that no one really knew what sex anyone was anyways — unless they were certain of it. No parent would encourage them to see hate that wasn’t there. Because those would be truly horrendous things to do. 

And yet, here we are. 

Yes indeed. Here we are. The scary part is that, once a parent has committed themselves to having a trans child, it’s very difficult to go back – to admit that they made a terrible mistake and have ruined their child’s life while in thrall to a shallow fashionable ideology that was always absolute nonsense.

How does one untangle it now? How can you tell a trans-identified boy that yes, he should absolutely be allowed to defy gender stereotypes but that one way of doing so would be to respect girls’ boundaries? How can he do that when you’ve spent the past few years insisting that even noticing adult human females exist as a meaningful category puts his life at risk? How do you tell him that no, he can’t change sex? Or that plenty of people who’ve been saying this aren’t hate-filled bigots, but very happy to support him in challenging sexism and homophobia, which are not things you do through acts of lifelong self-harm? There is no way of telling a trans-identified boy he can no longer be a girl guide without destroying his trust in the very adults who’ve spent years telling him that the rest of the world is out to destroy him.…

There are adult males who have used gender self-ID selfishly and deliberately. Children and teenagers are a different matter. They have been used and deceived, and there is no way of undoing the harm without causing them further distress. Of course, it may be less distress than if one were to continue down the same path as before. A tweet from the account @wokeandwoofing put it fairly succinctly:

“I brainwashed my son into thinking he was a girl. Chemically castrated him with puberty blockers. Then persuaded him to have his penis cut off. And now the Girl Guides won’t let him in. How could anyone be so cruel to a child?”…

At some point it has to stop. As a long-time critic of gender identity ideology, I know and hate the fact that this will cause enormous upset to some children. I want what I always wanted — for these children to be loved, supported, encouraged to be different, content in their own bodies, and trusting of others. It’s not people like me who took that away from them. Hopefully some repair is possible. For that, activist adults need to put their self-interest to one side and start telling the truth.