There were always hucksters selling colourful rubbish. For all my life, there have been ‘successful’, big businesses selling stuff to teenagers. Now, under the cover of the internet, kids are being sold dangerous things in the name of authenticity – just how can it be that you have to buy things in order to ‘be your authentic self’?

Well okay, that’s not logical but it is what teens tend to do, and that’s why they’re such a lucrative target for hucksters. I remember when it was jeans, boots and so on. You just couldn’t express yourself until you’d laid hands on enough cash to have the right jeans and boots – oh, and silver, and LPs, and posters and piercings and hair dyes and tattoos…

…if only it had stayed that way. Now, they’re selling the kids piercings, hair dyes, tattoos, outfits, music, binders, hormones and invasive surgery, all in the name of ‘be your authentic self’. And they don’t leave the kids to decide they’ll ‘just die’ if they can’t have them.  In my youth for example, there were people trying to sell drugs – recreational or ‘weight loss’ pills – to teens but at least we had plenty of people telling us why that was a really bad deal. Now, it’s the opposite. Everywhere our kids turn they’ve got school teachers and social workers and lobby groups and ‘trainers’ — organizations people see as services, charities, educators, reinforcing the hucksters’ message, telling kids they’ll just die if they can’t have the name, the pronouns, the clothes, the hormones, the invasive surgery…

Kids desperately need us out there, putting the case for sanity. We’ve been trying – for years, some of us – but it all seemed to be spiralling out of control, with every attempt to apply the brakes shouted down as ‘transphobia’, until the Cass Report came out, and some politicians began to find their courage — and what happened then? Along came the trendy, middle class, jolly well-educated, progressive, inclusive ‘good guys’…

And the result?

For years now, women in particular who’ve ‘had concerns’ about what’s happening to our kids have been sounding alarms, and asking and asking for some evidence about the consequences of transitioning youngsters. The first answer has usually been ‘that’s a transphobic question’ but wherever questioners persisted, it turned out there had been no high quality longitudinal studies. (Research-speak for serious attempts to find out what happens to ‘trans kids’ long term. We all know they’re pleased to start with…)

But now at least we have the Cass Report…

Download the Cass Report

For many of us, the anecdotal evidence has been building a horror story for years. We still don’t have enough information – this all happened too suddenly and ‘gender training’ had been in schools for too long before most people realized it was happening but it’s beginning to look as though well over half of young transitioners are looking for a way back after five years or so, and that ‘way back’, such as it is, is just as fraught with traumas and danger. You can’t mess with adolescent hormones and development without consequences.

It may be okay for older men to ‘change sex’ and flounce around in woman-face but they have a mature, settled physiology and anyway, very few of them choose to risk any kind of surgery beyond a ‘boob job’ and/or a facial. The stories of young ‘detransitioners’ however, are something else. I think the first one I encountered was Kiera Bell’s.

How that didn’t stop the train I will never understand but it didn’t, and YouTube is filling with similar accounts to Keira’s. Even the mainstream press is beginning to include them more often – here’s one from this week…

But I think what hit me the hardest was a young woman who stood up unexpectedly at a meeting I attended in Brighton, and said…

Until very recently, all these stories were pushed aside as aberrations. The prevailing story remained that kids would die if they didn’t get their names, their pronouns, their hormones, those surgeries. People like me who stuck their necks out got a lot of flack. They still try it now, but the story is out there. After the recent election, an opinion survey found that people were fed up with politicians talking about the topic but let’s face it, they weren’t making much sense. It’s important that we in the real world have those conversations now, especially about who’s teaching what to youngsters, and with what effect.

Would you just die?

Sure, worse things have happened to kids – are happening to kids – being trafficked into the sex industry from the squalid prison/refugee camps in France, being starved and buried in rubble in Gaza (“I think Israel does have that right”) and all over the world, online, on their phones, all night, the onslaught of hard porn and hard sell everything — my gods we need to be out defending kids from all of that but, the reason the expensive and dangerous quest for ‘your authentic self’ is particularly alarming in our era is that everyone has been selling it to them.

From the librarians who gush over ‘drag queen story time’ through the vicars who croon about ‘inclusion’ through the rainbow police and ‘progressive’ school teachers and social workers, and in some tragic cases, misguided parents — everyone is coming at them with rainbow flags, unicorns and glitter, focusing all their discontents and traumas into the quest for ‘authentic identity’ then passing them on to snake oil sales teams disguised as charities and services.

If only they looked like this, they’d be easier to root out…

We need to rescue our kids

I used to think declaring as ‘non-binary’ was a brilliant get-out clause – a way of being gender-non-conforming that lesbian, gay and other ‘different’ kids could take on without being trapped by the trans industry – until I discovered my GP was getting special funding for ‘treating’ non-binary youngsters. There is no tangible definition of nb but – there are ‘treatments’. Gender ideology is a ruthless, neoliberal confidence trick. Nb began to trend, and without missing a beat, the monster was out there selling everything from accessories to mastectomies to nb youngsters as a way to be more non-binary, more authentic. It really is a miracle that most kids have managed to dodge this one.

But it’s the vulnerable kids who fall for it, which is why we need everyone who sees the problem on side, to help kids see the difference between gender-non-conformity (very healthy), lesbian and gay behaviour (yes, Mr Galloway et al, it is normal) and the pernicious, sex-denying gender-ideology trick posing as ‘diversity’, ‘trans liberation’, or whatever they think of next. Everywhere you see the rainbows and unicorns and flags, everywhere you see or hear people brushing off ideas about ‘culture wars’ and ‘cancel culture’, everywhere we hear words like ‘progressive’ and ‘inclusive’ we need to ask searching questions and complain loudly if we find the gender ideology sellers at work.

The interview linked below is a top-quality primer as to what we need to be saying (all except Joyce’s habitual (untrue) side-swipe at Corbyn. In my view, that’s just as much a nonsense as the idea that feminists are ‘anti-trans’.)

Here’s how you argue for sanity and safeguarding for women and girls…

We’ll never stop kids trying too hard to ‘be’ something – it’s part of growing up. But we do need to stop teachers, social workers, politicians and everyone else going along with the rainbow unicorn ‘wouldn’t you just die’ brigade.

So let’s all get out there now and tell the teachers, the doctors, the librarians, the health and social care people and the festival wallahs that we want today’s kids to learn what my generation learned in the last century – that you can be as flowery and flouncy or as tough and sporty as you like, you can be gay or straight or anything in between – you can be your authentic self without special pronouns, without trusses or pills or surgery, because what you are already is unique and precious, whoever you are.

Wouldn’t it be great if the world of books could help, bigging up stories about gay and lesbian kids, and gender-non-conforming kids, without piling on the gender ideology — unfortunately, publishing has gone almost entirely in the opposite direction, to the extent that gender-critical authors and publishers are yelling for help. Here’s the latest one…

We need to demand voices in schools and health, in the police and youth groups, telling kids that denying your sex, or trying to ‘change sex’ is about as far away from authentic as you can get, and is every bit as dangerous as trying to solve problems with the old fashioned kinds of drugs.

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