Transitioning children – how young is too young?

Today’s Grauniad, (24/8/21) features an article entitled ‘I feel like it’s quite shaky acceptance’: trans kids and the fight for inclusion’, by transactivist Shon Faye.

Yes, that is the Shon who advised ‘children’ to ‘be sluttier than you are’, ‘suck dick and get tits early’.

Yes, the one who tweeted at a lesbian to ‘enjoy your erasure’.

Shhhh. Listen.

In today’s Grauniad, Shon is an advocate for much younger children.

The piece starts with a quote from a parent who describes their son as an ‘assigned male child’. We are told by the author that “a few years ago, her mum assumed she was a boy.”

Sex is not assigned. It is observed. The child’s mother ‘assumed’ he was a boy for a very good reason.

Faye refers repeatedly to ‘gender assigned at birth’ which is misleading. It is not possible to discuss the issues confronting trans-identified children if we are going to be forced to use inaccurate language. This is very convenient for some people.

Those who claim otherwise remind me of religious zealots who answer any questions about their beliefs with the triumphant cry of ‘ but, look, it says it in the bible so it must be true!’

If you don’t believe the bible is the word of god- or that human beings are born with gendered souls- the conversation cannot even start to take place unless your position is acknowledged.

I believe neither of these remarkably similar doctrines.

The mother of the child refers to those who don’t believe in gender ideology as ‘haters’.

Heretic or idiot?

Those with concerns about the huge and sudden increase in trans-identified children, Shon professes, are showing ‘a perilous misunderstanding of the reality’.  This increase is evidently not a trend at all: suddenly thousands of kids have found the words to express themselves after centuries of silence.

This explanation raises more questions than it answers. Why are the younger kids mostly boys? Why are the teenagers nearly all girls? Why are the middle-aged transitioners, who so gleefully grab wigs, high heels and make-up pallets,  all men?

How old is too old?

Faye refers to the case of a 90 year old man who has recently started taking oestrogen to help him ‘become a woman’.

“Now I’m having a great time,” says Patricia, who used to be called Peter. Patricia has long white hair and wears a shaped salmon pink jacket and a long navy skirt.

“I didn’t want toy soldiers. I wanted an ironing board.” In one of many photos a blusher brush gently caresses his cheek.

Born in the wrong body? Not any more!

Last year, suddenly, the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative was rejected by outspoken TRAs such as Mermaids and Munroe Bergdorf. Coincidentally, this was just a few days after the government said it should not be taught as fact in schools. Suddenly we were being told that trans children don’t necessarily like the toys and things associated with the opposite sex- whoops, sorry, gender. Instead they ‘just know’ they are trans.

But wait…    THEY JUST KNOW.

But what if…    THEY JUST KNOW.

But perhaps sometimes…    THEY JUST KNOW.

FFS. They just know, alright?

Four years old

Thus we are told that Alex, the child in the article, likes books, doesn’t like dolls and isn’t a girly girl. But it’s also pointed out that his clothes come ‘entirely from the girls section’.

Alex was just three when he began telling his parents he was a ‘good girl’ not a ‘good boy’.

When Alex was four, his parents wrote to their local nursery explaining that Alex had ‘wrestled for a long time with her identity‘ and would now be ‘living as a girl’.

Now Alex is at primary school and parents who express concerns about their daughters sharing swimming and gym classes are described as ‘hostile’ and ‘not properly accepting’.

At four, Alex is not England’s youngest rainbow child.

“A proud Doncaster dad has spoken out about his four year-old trans son,” reported the Doncaster Free Press, adding that the child knew aged just three “that he was the wrong gender.”

4-year-old Stormy Stubbings, a girl who ‘hated pigtails and dresses’ or even ‘pretty shoes’ hit the news this year when her father claimed she first began showing signs of identifying as boy at just 18 months old. Stormy used to wear pink tutus but now wears a ‘coolest kid ever’ T shirt and ‘lives as a boy’. The family have appeared on television.

Three years old

Some children are transitioned even younger than Alex and Stormy.

In 2019 there was a court case after concerns were raised about Lancashire foster parents who transitioned their own son and a foster son at ages 7 and 3 respectively. Astonishingly, a  judge ruled that he believed the kids were ‘appropriately supported’.  You can read the details of the case here and Transgender Trend’s assessment here.

Shon appears to view the transitioning of children who are little more than babies to be entirely acceptable and undeserving of scrutiny, expressing only concern for families in a similar position who may have “feared being involved in such proceedings themselves”.

Indeed, there are other ‘trans toddlers’ around, such as Luna, who had always shunned ‘football stuff’, preferring to play with dolls.

Luna always wanted to be a girl, first expressing the desire when he was just three, and readers of the Daily Mail are told that ‘mum Jeneen made it happen with the help of Mermaids’.

The link to the LGB

“The idea of parents supporting their gay, lesbian and bi kids has gradually become less controversial,” writes Shon, referring to the state-sanctioned homophobia of section 28 and the anti-gay agenda of Thatcher’s government.

What does this have to do with a little boy, too young yet for big school, who believes he should have been born a girl- and whose parents agree with him?

Trans kids, Faye tells us, say they are bullied for being LGBTQ+, as if trans-identification- especially among three and four year olds- has anything to do with same-sex attraction.

The most glaring difference is that supporting your same-sex attracted kid does not lead them down a path to a lifetime of medicalisation and surgery and expecting the entire world to comply with a delusion.

If a transitioned child is to maintain the illusion into adulthood, the path of medical transition is unavoidable. Surely social transition should be viewed with a more cautious eye?

Homophobia is closely linked to trans-ideology, reflected in Shon’s own discomfort in being perceived as a gay man, and echoed in Fox Fisher’s statement that associating the T with LGB somehow suggests ‘deviance’ on the part of trans people.

Faye slags off Transgender Trend of course (click on the link he provides and it takes you right back to the Grauniad) although he does quote two of  TGT’s very sensible observations.

Firstly, that trans children and young people are ‘a very new phenomenon’ and secondly that “schools need to be aware that there is no long-term evidence base to support the ‘transition’ of children, including social transition.”

The reader is repeatedly reminded that any discussion of transgenderism in children causes problems. Media coverage, which Alex’s mother calls ‘media misrepresentation’, causes bullying. The documentary Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? caused a ‘proper problem’. Public concerns about transitioning kids are ‘a moral panic’.

Mirror mirror

Children are the new figurehead of transactivism. After all, children, like puppies, rainbows and fluffy unicorns, are innocent and guileless. A far cry from men with 5 o’clock stubble, sporting cheap wigs and too-tight clothing, demanding store staff call them ‘ma’am’, trans-identified children are the feel-good face of transactivism.

But there are numerous situations in which we do not affirm our children’s erroneous beliefs: some might say that was part of our job as parents.

Affirmation reinforces the child’s delusion. Of course agreeing with a pre-schooler (or a child of any age) that they are actually the opposite sex (call it gender to muddy the waters if you must) reinforces the idea. It is a sticking plaster at best. Why would we think otherwise? We are all influenced by the opinions of those around us, why should our children not be?

Trans away the non-conformity

A socially transitioned child approaching puberty will, understandably, look to hormone treatments to maintain the illusion. The parents, affirming so far, are hardly likely to change their position overnight. And so, medical transition begins.

What’s overlooked in claims of long waiting lists and careful psychological analysis is that a parent who wishes to skip the queues, and has a few hundred quid to spare, can easily get their hands on hormones for their child. Cue Helen Webberly and co, for example. Safeguarding issues surrounding this situation are woefully inadequate: one thing that never seems to be considered is pressure on the children of fiercely trans-activist parents.  It’s hard enough for desisters to speak up as it is. When your parent has given over their entire life to declaring that you were definitely, 100%, actually meant to have been born the opposite sex (but not in those words, of course) it’s going to be tough AF to contradict them.

This did happen recently when transactivist Amanda Jette Knox’s trans-identified child, ‘a girl, always was a girl, definitely a girl, knows herself, is 100% a girl’ etc, changed his status to non-binary. So. Not always a girl then.

This can’t have been easy for the child after mama’s high-profile insistence on the subject. Trans-identified kids often use non-binary as a way to slide out of the cult- my own daughter ‘became’ non-binary for a while when she decided to disentangle herself. Knox, in case you didn’t know, had a husband who became her wife and now describes herself as a lesbian.

Some questions

Why would we affirm such a delusion in a child or young person?

Why would we gaslight an entire school of children into pretending that somebody is something they are not?

Why are so many people unable to see the inherent sexism and homophobia behind such ‘acceptance’?

Why are we so blasé about setting kids off down a pathway that can result in sterility before they are even old enough to go to school?

Why are late-transitioned adult men such cheerleaders for the transgender child?

How young is too young?

Five? Three?

Two?

How about we ask Dr Diane Ehrensaft?

Ehrensaft is a developmental and clinical psychologist in San Francisco. Her website says she is Director of Mental Health and founding member of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco and  chief psychological at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic.

One?

At a meeting, Ehrensaft was asked if she thought children could give pre-verbal signs that they were transgender. Certainly, she replied, citing examples of a trans baby who pulled out her girly hairgrips in anger, and another who unsnapped his onesies to make flowing dresses.

This is what she said.

“So let me give you an example. I have a colleague who’s transgender, and there is a video of him as a toddler- he was assigned female at birth- tearing barrettes out of then-her hair and throwing them on the ground, and sobbing. That’s a gender message, and when it happens, not just once or twice or three times, that’s a gender message. Sometimes kids between the age of one and two, with beginning language will say “I boy!” when you say ‘girl’. Those two words “I boy!”, that’s not a pre-verbal but an early verbal message….  they can’t say that between one and two, but they can show you what they want to play with, and if they feel uncomfortable about how you are responding to them and their gender, if you’re misgendering them.  So you look for those kinds of actions: like tearing a skirt off. There was one, I think this was in the Barbara Walters special, where this child wore the little onesies with snapups between the legs, and at age one would unsnap them to make a dress, and have the dress flow. This is a child who is assigned male. That’s communication, a pre-verbal communication.”

7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Looks like you’re never too young.