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.

[conuly]

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

[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]

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.

[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.