Child Torture is Now Mandatory in the UK

[steepholm]

I'm not normally an angry person, but I've been angry this week. The judgement of the High Court that trans children must be forced to go through a puberty contrary to their gender identity, despite the existence of a safe alternative in the form of puberty blockers, amounts not only to forced conversion therapy of the most brutal kind, but, in effect, child torture.

If that language sounds overblown, I suggest you ask how you'd feel if you (or your child) had been ordered by a court to go through permanent sexual changes contrary to your identity. With the kicker that, once you were marked out in that way - through growing breasts and wide hips, or a beard and low voice - you would then be stigmatised for those things by the very same people who forced you to go through the process. (See countless transphobic tropes about broad-shouldered trans women, etc.)

The holes in the judgement's reasoning are astounding. Puberty blockers are totally reversible in their effect - if you stop taking them, puberty simply proceeds - but the judgement treats them as if they were an inevitable prelude to cross-sex hormones, rather than a chance for children to take a few years' breathing space to come to a considered decision.

Yes, most children on blockers go on to transition. The reason is that most children on blockers are trans - and have already shown their consistency, having waited 18 months or more for a first appointment. The court assumes, however, that it's a kind of conveyor belt, and insists that children must be in a position to consent to cross-sex hormones before starting blockers - a position so perverse that I'm surprised the High Court wasn't sucked into a time-space vortex.

Blockers are also described as an experimental and potentially dangerous drug - but only when given to trans people. When prescribed for cis children with precocious puberty - as they have been, safely, for 35 years - they're perfectly fine.

The wider implications of undoing so-called Gillick competence - the legal principle that allows children to make limited decisions about their own bodies - have been quickly seized on by anti-contraception and anti-abortion groups. Indeed, the case was brought by a lawyer with a long history in the anti-abortion world. But supposedly feminist groups such as WPUK applaud, because it hurts trans people - and that's always good. And supposedly liberal papers like The Observer parrot the same lies. And all of them think they're torturing children for their own good. Because, after all, wouldn't it be better if everyone could just be cis after all? Torturing trans children is a small price to pay if it means that one cis child is saved from making a mistake. Actually, it's not even a price - it's a good thing in itself! Let's make them go through permanent bodily changes so that they can realise that everybody should be cis. Let's take a tip from people who rape lesbians to make them straight! It's the same logic!

That's where liberal Britain is today. Fuck them all.

Meanwhile, I bought a picture of a tree.



When you have finished looking at my tree, please consider donating to the fund to appeal the High Court's blatantly discriminatory decision.

Comments

[jadelennox]

I don't understand how in Britain -- which is so much further left than the US that there are mainstream Tory positions that the American democrats barely think to whisper -- theoretically left wing "feminists" are so entrenched in transphobia, whilst in the US, even our horrorshow right wing court system often ends up affirming some trans rights. Which is not to say that the US is not a cesspool of transphobic laws and facts on the ground, because of course it is. But is there was something we did right in the progessive several decades, that made it so we've come to a point where the mainstream liberal and leftist positions are at least some level of trans affirmation, is it something that can be replicated in the UK?

My main newspaper is the Guardian, and it seems like at least once a year the Guardian US journalists band together to write a piece that basically says, hey, Guardian UK journalists and our parent company? You did a transphobia again. Stop it!

Anyway this is a shithow ruling basing in no logic or science, let alone ethics, and what a nightmare for all the kids.

[steepholm]

I'm not sure how that happened either. It does seem paradoxical. A lot of the transphobes seem to have mainlined Janice Raymond and her ilk - who is American, after all - and to have stopped there, circa 1980. I often detect a general iffiness about intersectionality, too. But why/how that toxicity flourished in the UK when in other respects - gay rights, for example - the country compares favourably with the US, I don't know.

(My best top-of-head guess about that is that homophobia in the US is often driven by religion, and the UK is not a very religious country; whereas transphobia in the UK is often sustained by cod-scientific arguments with a superficial plausibility to people who don't know much about the subject.)

[sovay]

But why/how that toxicity flourished in the UK when in other respects - gay rights, for example - the country compares favourably with the US, I don't know.

I was also wondering, because from the outside it looked as though it really blew up in the last few years, but I figured it was more a matter of me in another culture not having access to the relevant information. The solicitor with his history of anti-abortion challenges and so-called Christian rights looked to me like exactly the sort of conservative, often Evangelical legal troll we increasingly get all the time in this country, which was unpleasant.

[steepholm]

I've certainly also heard whispers of American rightwing funding going to soi-disant feminist groups in the UK, the kind of alliance between conservative rightwingers and terfs in the cause of persecuting trans people that you see in groups such as Hands Across the Aisle.

[sovay]

I've certainly also heard whispers of American rightwing funding going to soi-disant feminist groups in the UK, the kind of alliance between conservative rightwingers and terfs in the cause of persecuting trans people that you see in groups such as Hands Across the Aisle.

The problem is that I wouldn't be surprised at all. If my information on the handling of travel and bubbling around Christmas is accurate, we (my life would be so much easier if English had a first person plural which carves out an exception for the speaker, preferably with extreme prejudice) already seem to have exported you the War on Christmas.

[lilliburlero]

I think there's a very distinct difference in how American and British culture views self-determination and personal autonomy. American culture seems to me broadly predisposed to take self-determination seriously, and regard it positively: it's seen as a virtue to assert one's sense of self, and individuals are seen as the best authority on themselves. And that (with the exception perhaps of conservative Christian Evangelical communities) is pretty true regardless of politics. So (non-Evangelical) American conservatives might see trans people as weird, freaky and undesirable, but they don't basically doubt that we're telling the truth about our experience of transness.

British culture tends to see such self-assertion as attention-seeking and spurious: the ultimate authority on your identity is other people. You are only anything insofar as other people can be persuaded to assert it; self-assertion is mistrusted - if you have to state something about yourself, it can't in fact be true. And this is also broadly true regardless of politics - as common among people who would call themselves left-wing as right-wing. Acceptance of gay people tends still to be conditional on a certain sort of empirical cisnormativity; bisexuality is widely distrusted (attention-seeking), and queer identities that don't fit a cis norm are even more suspect (worst of sins: thinking you are special). So where socially liberal Americans tend to accept a very broad range of queer identity, a lot of Brits have this sceptical-empirical thing going on. (There's a big overlap between militant atheism and transphobia in Britain too: the source of this puzzling assertion that being trans is a "religion" that we're imposing on others.)

I would also add that there's a certain sort of British person who identifies as "left" but is unthinkingly imperialist and Unionist: among English transphobes reflexive Unionism is almost universal (transphobia in Scottish Nationalism is its own fascinating subject) and those attitudes are also reproduced widely on the right wing of the Labour party and in the UK Guardian/Observer editorial.

[steepholm]

Yes to all that.

[conuly]

Fucking fuck. Sounds like they aren't even hiding their garbage behind "parental rights" bullshittery.

[steepholm]

It couldn't be more blatant.

[sovay]

When you have finished looking at my tree, please consider donating to the fund to appeal the High Court's blatantly discriminatory decision.

Thank you for the link.

[cmcmck]

You'll know what I think of it without even asking me. :o(

It'll be appealed up all the way and we can only hope sanity will prevail!

[maellenkleth]

From your mouth to Their ears!

[steepholm]

It's hard to believe it won't be overturned. But it was hard to believe it would be passed in the first place, so my faith in the UK system is not high.

[cmcmck]

Mine never was, sadly. :o(

[maellenkleth]

Predictable outcome from a system which entails the formal registration of transsexuals.

On an allied note, an older Lesbian friend out-and-out refused to answer a census question concerning the gender specifics of her marriage, on the grounds that (in the event of accession to power by the right wing) such statistics could be used against her (and her partner's) well-being.

I share that view.

[maellenkleth]

Well, this is a bloody awful thing.

Perhaps the younglings can avail themselves of the workaround the physicians offered me fifty years ago (well before blockers came on the scene) -- high-dosage contraceptives? Or is the precedent now set, so broad as to prevent the prescription of The Pill?

[thistleingrey]

arrgh. It is a lovely tree and a very upsetting court judgment.

[ashlyme]

I wish I could be more articulate about this but it's fucking evil bullshit, plain and simple.

[steepholm]

To be honest, that covers the case pretty much exactly.

[calimac]

I've noticed in the past a treatment of gays and lesbians that has an unspoken root assumption that homosexuality does not actually exist. The current judgment seems to me a treatment of trans people on the equivalent unspoken assumption.

[steepholm]

We only do it to annoy
Because we know it teases.

Agreed, that seems to be an element, with some people at least.