By Jack Pilkington
IN the weeks following the furore over transgender swimmer Lia (formerly William) Thomas’s sham 500-yard freestyle national college title victory in the US, the discussion surrounding the integrity of women’s sport is finally receiving the support and attention it deserves.
In Britain, a whiff of the trans lobby’s overwhelming political influence facing more of a backlash came via the news that another trans athlete, Emily Bridges (formerly Zach), a cyclist hoping to compete in the British National Omnium Championship, had been banned from taking part by the Union Cycliste Internationale – the Swiss-based world governing body for sports cycling – citing the very pertinent information that ‘she’ was in fact still registered (and racing) as a ‘he’ as recently as last month.
Progress of a kind, perhaps, especially when one considers the past successes of the Canadian cyclist Rachel McKinnon, who won consecutive titles at the UCI’s very own Women’s Masters Track World Championship in 2018 and 2019.
Rachel, who was born Rhys, and now uses the name ‘Veronica Ivy’, decided to celebrate ‘her’ victory in that typically feminine and gracious way by calling any objectors ‘losers’.
Alas, as the ‘social justice’ industry has made clear by now, it is far easier, cheaper and impactful to stymie vital cultural conversations with the odd smear campaign than anything else.
But as the long-overdue fightback in support of women’s rights to free and fair competition rages on, and as growing numbers of the young are marketed more ‘gender identities’ than they are Disney films, is now the time to address the devastating damage that comes with nudging future generations towards ‘gender dysphoria’ acceptance?
The exact numbers are consistently difficult to source but ‘tentative’ estimates from a 2018 Government Equalities Office report on ‘Transgender People in the UK’ put their numbers at 200,000-500,000. Although this accounts only for a tiny percentage of the entire population, in recent years a stark increase in childhood referrals to the country’s now-notorious ‘Gender Identity Development Service’ – GIDS for short – at the Tavistock Clinic in North London, has brought to light the desperate need for a nationwide debate regarding the moral, ethical, medical and cultural questions surrounding the ‘trans kids’ phenomenon.
A referral rise of more than 1,000 per cent in male children and 4,400 per cent in female children from 2009-2019 led Theresa May’s then ‘Equalities Minister’, Penny Mordaunt, to launch an investigation into why there had been such a sharp spike of kids (as young as three) and teenagers passing through the clinic’s doors. To date, no results have been published.
Yet despite the lockdowns, as of May 2021, in England alone, GIDS still managed to see 2,242 child patients, just 323 short of its highest annual tally of 2,565 preceding the arrival of the Wuhan Flu. In 2010, the number was a mere 134.
Whilst much has been written about the explosion of such trends, including more ‘access’ to transgender health services and more surgeons available (particularly in America) to perform gender ‘reassignment’ or ‘affirmation’ surgery, some studies have revealed an apparent correlation between trans individuals who have also been diagnosed with autism.
At the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, findings in mid-2020 led to the conclusion that transgender and ‘gender-diverse’ adults are three to six times more likely to be diagnosed as autistic than the general population. Furthermore, they were also ‘more than twice as likely’ to have received multiple diagnoses of specified mental health conditions, including schizophrenia, and particularly depression.
Interestingly, the study references a previous paper from the US – the largest of its kind – where gender dysphoria in a dataset of 300,000 children was found in ‘four times’ the amount of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) than those without.
Regardless of such traits, and mounting testimony from ‘detransitioners’ – ex-transgender patients who received surgery and now wish to revert to their biological sex – the ethical questions remain surrounding early treatment and the future repercussions of decisions leading to irreversible hormonal or surgical damage.
Worryingly, the start of such a process can begin very early on; one case, in New South Wales, Australia, stoked righteous criticism when it was revealed that a four-year-old would ‘transition their gender’ even before attending preschool.
Age, in an age of transgenderism, it seems, really is nothing but a number, in spite of data which suggests children would, given time, eventually ‘grow out of’ any initial feeling of gender dysphoria, highlighting the unnecessary physiological or psychological harm that could be caused by early diagnosis and/or treatment.
Nevertheless, following the initial stages of ‘affirmation’, where medical professionals working in the field are often pressured to accept the declarations of trans patients whatever their age to help prevent stigma, offence, or future harm (as explained in great detail by a former Tavistock psychotherapist here), later processes such as hormone therapy, in which a patient maybe given controversial (and sometimes dangerous) doses of ‘puberty blockers’, may well take place.
Self-harm, like attempted suicide, continues to prevail at most stages of ‘transitioning’. One very thorough Swedish study which tracked ‘sex-reassigned’ patients over the course of 30 years concluded: ‘Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment.’
In America, the latest horrific trend is Nullification. Thankfully unavailable to UK patients (for now), this growing racket lends itself to the very peculiar (and unbalanced) needs of the so-called ‘non-binary’ patient, enabling them, in the words of Align Surgical, a trans-only cosmetic surgery practice in California (where else?), to ‘enjoy a relatively smooth genital area’.
Also known as a ‘Eunuch procedure’, this process effectively allows patients to ‘Barbie doll’ their entire body, removing every reproductive organ, breasts and nipples to ‘help’ them realise their ideal ‘gender non-conforming’ aesthetic.
As eye-watering as it might be to learn that such ‘health’ procedures exist, it is, I believe, paramount to be aware of them if only to help us realise, much like the current Covid obsession with mass childhood inoculation, the impending regret we, as a society, will later have to face by allowing our youngest and most vulnerable to offer themselves up to irredeemable medical mutilation.
This will surely be the end result if we do not speak more honestly and openly about this ever-growing societal shift under the far-Left banners of trans ‘inclusivity’ and ‘diversity’; banners which, apparently, President Joe Biden dementedly demands to promote, not only as normal, but desired.
Whilst it is, of course, incumbent on us to retain ideals of respect and tolerance wherever possible, in transgenderism’s current aggressive and unforgiving form, we must not forget what’s at stake here. Not just the rights of biological women to be called women, to own their own language and history and to be allowed their own spaces and sports like the rest of us, but for the rights of childrento live and grow without succumbing to the force-fed fallacies and fantasies of the infantilised adults around them.
We owe them that at least, don’t we?
This appeared in The Commoner on April 4, 2022, and is republished by kind permission.
