Child Torture is Now Mandatory in the UK
Dec. 6th, 2020 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 08:32 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 08:49 pm (UTC)(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.)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 09:11 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 09:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 09:41 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 12:30 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 02:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 08:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 08:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 09:03 pm (UTC)Thank you for the link.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 09:32 pm (UTC)It'll be appealed up all the way and we can only hope sanity will prevail!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 10:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 08:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 11:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 05:55 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-06 10:20 pm (UTC)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?
(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 01:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 05:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 05:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 05:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-12-07 05:26 pm (UTC)Because we know it teases.
Agreed, that seems to be an element, with some people at least.