Transgender parents’ concerns should be heard

The attempts to shout down and shut up an anonymous mother who raised concerns about her child’s gender transition will do no one any good – especially the vulnerable, writes Louise Roberts.

No parent wants their child to struggle with their sexual or gender identity and effectively live a lie.

We raise our sons and daughters with the universal maxim to be themselves and we yearn for them to have a contented life imbued with direction and purpose.

But it remains a challenge for parents when political ideology takes precedence over commonsense and science. Plus the value of time. Time to explore whether something is the wisest course of action to take.

Keira Bell speaks to reporters outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Britain. Picture: EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga

And it is more pertinent than ever with the recent UK case of Keira Bell, a 23-year-old from Cambridge, who has sued a clinic for prescribing her puberty blockers at a young age.

Time ultimately is what she needed. Bell, born female, battled gender dysphoria and believed that becoming male was the answer to securing that aforementioned contentment.

But it did not and last week Britain’s High Court agreed that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust should have done more to challenge her decision to transition to a male.

As a result of the ruling, in effect people aged under 16 in the UK now cannot give informed consent to taking drugs which block puberty.

The long term consequences of a wrong decision are obvious, as Bell has discovered as she transitions back to being a woman. “I started to realise that the vision I had as a teenager of becoming male was strictly a fantasy and that it was not possible,” Bell says.

It is painful to read.

Illustration by Terry Pontikos.

“I was being perceived as a man by society, but it was not enough … I felt like a fraud and I began to feel more lost, isolated and confused than I did when I was pre-transition.”

Thoughtful but also cautious at being at the heart of this maelstrom, Bell says her mission is about protecting vulnerable children — not politics. And that’s something we can all agree on surely — protecting vulnerable children.

In modern Australian society, we should be able to question the validity of child sexual transition in a calm and factual manner.

If I am concerned about my daughter wanting to transition to ­become a male, isn’t that my very DNA as a parent to express concern?

In the current woke thinking, I would be considered the roadblock to her finding happiness as a he. But the outrage and belligerence triggered by a newspaper column at the weekend — written by an “anonymous mother” to no doubt conceal the child’s identity — shows how poisonous so-called ­debate has become.

The mum’s crime was to state, in her experience, that is it “too easy to get medical treatment for children to change gender”.

Maybe the complex psychological and emotional aspects influencing these decisions need to be more forensically addressed, she ventured.

Irreversible Damage book author Abigail Shrier.

“In our experiences with healthcare professionals in this field, it seems the current approach is to assume all patients are genuinely ­transgender and the only path for them is to physically transition”, she wrote. “There does not seem to be any real consideration that the child may be experiencing a number of other psychological factors that may lead them to declare themselves ­transgender.”

And that’s before we begin to consider the other permanent effects of powerful puberty blocking drugs, from infertility to lost bone density.

That’s why this debate should only ever be about the child who is experiencing issues and not about who can shout the loudest.

Yet time and again it is activists who try to shout down those who would raise legitimate warning flags — as the response to the anonymous parent who wrote on the weekend discovered

It mirrors the reaction to author Abigail Shrier and her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which ­activists tried to have removed from bookstore shelves in the US.

Shrier writes: “There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most ­teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.”

No one is suggesting that gender dysphoria is contagious. Likewise anyone who says “but what about” is not automatically transphobic.

I have a friend who has seen the issue from two very different perspectives. A few years ago, one of her son’s friends decided she identified as a boy.

She was in Year Nine at high school and she was very open about her decision and her parents were very supportive. They approached the school and explained that their daughter wanted to start wearing the boys’ school uniform and using the boys’ bathroom.

The school agreed and they moved forward with the plan. There were no issues with the girl’s fellow students – all respected her wishes, my friend said.

“I thought the decision would expose the girl to all types of bullying, but barely an eyebrow was raised,” my friend told me. “When I asked my son about it, he just shrugged and said it was her free choice and not a big deal.”

For close to a year the girl continued to identify as a boy, wore the male uniform and talked about taking the next steps towards a more formal transition.

Then over the summer holiday, between year nine and year 10 she changed her mind. When she returned to school the next year she was back in the girls’ uniform and back using the girls’ bathrooms.

“She told me she had just been ­experimenting, and she said she was lucky her parents hadn’t given in to her requests to start immediately transitioning,” my friend told me.

“Her parents suggested she try ­living as a boy to see whether it was a moniker that really did fit. For her it didn’t.”

Conversely, I have another friend whose daughter has a 15-year-old friend — one of identical twin girls — who has been determined to transition to a boy since she was 13.

Her parents have tried hard to ­accept her decision, while trying to also encourage her to wait before embarking on any irreversible medical intervention.

“As time goes on her resolve only strengthens, so her parents feel they have to accept it is inevitable,” my friend told me.

“For them, they definitely do not see this as a phase.”

Both young peoples’ stories are legitimate, and both deserve to find happiness.

But it is wrong to insist the solution to questions about gender should be the most radical ones because we risk denying time to young people.