Too many conservatives are behaving as if Donald Trump’s inauguration has somehow done to wokery what garlic does to a vampire; as if they can now sit back and watch the orange mist vaporise ideological insanity across the West. A study released today by the University of York shows just how crazy this sort of complacency is.
Academics analysed GP records and discovered what looks like a 50-fold increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria in children between 2011 and 2021. They estimate that there were 10,000 diagnoses made in 2021, up from just 200 in 2011. It’s horrifying, especially when you consider all the countless others who currently self-identify as trans and are now somewhere in the rainbow pipeline, drifting towards diagnosis.
Do MPs imagine this is some sort of high-water mark, before the turn of the trans tide? It’s really not. The response to the story makes that perfectly plain. If we really were waking up, as a nation, to the state our kids are in, there’d be horrified comments from doctors and a commitment across Whitehall to addressing the situation; we’d be discussing the fact that the Stonewall agenda has grown live ivy into, and around, all the institutions we assume will keep children safe. In schools and in after-school clubs, on TV and online, children are surrounded by adults who actually suggest to them gender dysphoria may be a cause of their ordinary anxieties.
Professor Tim Doran from the University of York said of the study that it was unclear whether anxiety causes the gender dysphoria or vice versa. The evidence so far cannot untangle this “chicken and egg” argument, he said. What hope do the children have? It’s a tribute to their good sense that more of them aren’t begging for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
On Wednesday, members of the Women and Equalities Committee (WESC) met to discuss the “evidence base on the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers.” As Hannah Barnes, (author of Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service), says, it was an appalling sign of what’s to come.
Dr Hilary Cass spent four years looking into gender dysphoria and puberty blockers, but she was not invited to contribute. Instead, the committee heard from consultant paediatric endocrinologist Professor Gary Butler, who was responsible for prescribing medication, including puberty blockers and hormones, to young people at University College London Hospitals; and from Professor Simon Giordano, who has argued that it is in the best interests of a child to offer puberty blockers early. It seems to me that both of these two are so deep into sunk cost that they’ve almost no choice but to keep sinking.
Barnes said: “That the committee would try to better in two hours what the Cass Review spent four years carefully investigating is incomprehensible.”
If even after the Cass review – even after all the sad, sometimes horrifying stories of people who’ve “detransitioned” – politicians still cling to the idea of gendered souls, what hope do school children have?
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