Trans ideas are a menace to children

I’m so glad this madness wasn’t around to addle my brain when I was nine. I absolutely hated being a girl. I was the biggest tomboy ever. My mother and her extended family (Middle Eastern Jews), like those from so many cultures, openly valued and favoured boys way above girls. The options for girls from my social class, religion and background seemed so limited, so crushing. Boys in my class could be thick-as, yet still insist they were better than you just because they were boys. I desperately wished I had been born a boy. When I hit puberty a couple of years later and began to attract vile attention from so many men on the streets, I would happily have taken some puberty-blockers had they been offered to me.

But the problem wasn’t my body. The problem was frustration and indignation at being treated in ways that were patronising, limiting or predatory just because I was a girl. The problem was the adults and the cultures around me that demanded I fit into certain gender roles.

I have the greatest sympathy for the horrible, invidious situation of those contemporary parents whose child declares himself to be ‘trans’. They are trapped in a sort of vicious, virtuous circle. Parents and other adults in the children’s lives want to be sympathetic and understanding, tolerant and accepting. So, afraid of making the child feel ‘rejected’, they feel compelled to buy into the powerful pro-trans ideology, and inadvertently compound it all by accepting kids as they ‘truly are’. The trouble is, most adults, let alone young people, never know who they ‘truly are’ or what that actually means. I know I don’t. What we can know, however, is our sex. And our sex is fixed.

We need to stop confusing and unwittingly exploiting children. Puberty is already discombobulating. Children don’t just need protection and boundaries in the spheres of social behaviour – they also need boundaries and protection in the intellectual and emotional sphere, too. If they tell us they think they might have been born into the wrong body, then it is our job to put them straight and then help them deal with the chaos of growing up.

Objectively, factually, scientifically, you are male or female. And that is fixed. Your thoughts and feelings and where you stand – where you choose to stand – in society are another matter entirely. That stuff is complex, murky and often unfathomable even to ourselves. Perhaps especially to ourselves.