Rita Panahi: Trans lobby has mastered the art of bully anyone who disagrees

Trans activists are hellbent on outlawing any opinion and debate that rightly questions the merits of giving life-changing treatment to confused children.

JK Rowling has been subjected to vile abuse. Picture: Getty

The star formerly known as Ellen Page, best known for playing a pregnant teen in Juno, has announced that she now identifies as non-binary and male with the pronouns he/they.

The Oscar-winning actor came out as a lesbian in 2014 and is married to a woman but is now considered a heterosexual male.

Within hours of the self-identification announcement, Ellen disappeared and Elliot, a married male actor, had taken over.

To question the logic of any of this, including the mystery of being both non-binary and identifying as male, will have you accused of new-age thought crimes such as deadnaming, hate speech and transphobia.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less if a Hollywood actor wants to identify as a pixie, a teapot or a pansexual panhandler.

Page is 33 and can do whatever they think will make them happy, but to criminalise any questioning of the trans activist agenda and to encourage confused children as young as 10 to begin treatment that has serious lifelong consequences is a different matter entirely.

Those issues deserve great scrutiny and discussion, though that comes with significant cost as writers such JK Rowling, Suzanne Moore and Abigail Shrier have found out.

All have been subjected to vile abuse, threats and reputational damage for stating widely held views on gender, womanhood and women’s rights.

Actor Elliot Page, formerly known as Ellen Page, has come out as transgender and non-binary.

The trans lobby has mastered the art of being the chief bully while simultaneously playing the victim; it has a disproportionate amount of power not only in the media, arts and academia but also in the medical and legal fraternity.

Trans activists also exert significant influence on governments and have succeeded in all but outlawing mainstream opinion and debate about the merits of allowing men who identify as women from having access to female only spaces such as shelters and change rooms and from competing in women’s sporting competitions.

There are, however, brave trans voices speaking out against the current madness, such as Blaire White, Cate McGregor and Debbie Hayton, but even they have copped terrible invective for stating uncomfortable truths.

This week the UK High Court delivered a crucial judgment that will hopefully restore some sanity and slow the speed with which troubled tweens and teens are allowed, some would argue encouraged, to transition.

The court found children under 16, and in some cases under 18, were not mature enough to consent to puberty blocking drugs and other interventions.

Keira Bell was one of the claimants who has suffered terribly after transitioning from female to male at the age of 16.

She was prescribed puberty blockers and then testosterone after just three appointments at a gender clinic which has clients as young as 10.

Now at the age of 23, she regrets taking the cocktail of drugs, undergoing a double mastectomy and fears she may never be able to have children.

The ruling against the Tavistock Centre and Portman NHS trust (which runs the UK’s only gender-identity program for children) should be a wake-up call for Australia’s medical and legal community and Victorian politicians who, under the guise of the anti-conversion bill, are seeking to introduce changes to the Equal Opportunity Act that redefine “gender identity”.

Last week The Australian reported that a 15-year-old child was removed from her parents’ care after they objected to her desire to undergo irreversible cross-sex hormone treatment to become male.

The parents are migrants who have seen their family torn apart because they want their child to receive non-invasive psychological care and for all her underlying issues to be fully investigated.

An Australian court has found the parents to be “abusive” because of their failure to embrace their child’s “gender identity”.

This is dangerous territory. Shrier investigated the trans phenomenon for her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

She warns parents against blindly accepting the advice of “gender-affirming educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls”.

Shrier argues “parents are being presented with the seductive idea of transition as a utopian cure-all” for troubled children who cannot fully understand the irreversible consequences of treatments and procedures involved in transitioning to a new gender.

But what can parents do if courts determine the child’s right to transition trumps their objection?

Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital is home to the biggest children’s gender clinic in Australia and has come under criticism from some medical professionals for putting children as young as 10 on puberty blockers.

The clinic, headed by Michelle Telfer, is pushing to perform double mastectomies on teenage girls under 17.

Don’t be surprised if there are class action lawsuits from Melbourne to London by people who have suffered permanent damage from treatments and procedures they had at an age when they were too young to give informed consent. 

IN SHORT

Prince Harry has suggested COVID-19 is divine punishment from Mother Nature before ranting about climate change. Again. Perhaps the plebs would take the royal more seriously if he refrained from travelling on emission-spewing private jets or living in mansions with massive carbon footprints.

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist

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