Detrans when transition.., p.5
DETRANS: When transition is not the solution, page 5
6. ROGD: A PSEUDO-MEDICALISED YOUTH SUBCULTURE
Recent years have seen a huge increase in the numbers of children self-identifying as trans. Any parent of a school age child will be aware of this, indeed one friend of mine told me that “it’s all my kids talk about”. Most schools will have kids identifying as ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’ in several years of the school. When I first started working at The Tavistock and Portman Clinics, their Child Gender Service (the infamous GIDS service which will be described in a later chapter) was very small. Then GIDS only received a limited number (possibly in the hundreds) of referrals each year and was a small Cinderella cog in an otherwise big wheel that had little to do with anything gender-related. Just before the service was investigated it was receiving several thousand referrals a year. It had become the largest department within the hospital and had become synonymous with the name of the Tavistock. So why this sudden increase in trans-identifying kids? One reason could be that all of a sudden there really are far more transsexual kids, but this does not explain why. Another explanation is that they are not really transsexual, and this is my opinion. Here I will explain why.
Since the baby boomers after the second world war, teenagers have drifted towards one youth subculture or another. There were the rockers, the hippies, the rockabillies, the Mods, then Punk came along followed by Goth with the New Romantics alongside, the Indie Kids and of course the HipHop and Rappers and the list goes on. Many of you reading this book, depending on when you grew up, will be familiar with such tribal groupings of youth. In the era prior to social media, youth subculture and our identities were bound up with the music and bands associated with that subculture. Those who knew me as a teenager will remember me as the Goth with gravity-defying hair dyed black or red or purple, copious amounts of make-up and far too much jewellery with an all-black wardrobe, usually with oversized cardigans with sleeves pulled down to my fingertips which would emerge from strategically placed holes. I was the youngest of my parents’ children, and by the time I was a teenager, all they were concerned about was whether I was doing well educationally, so luckily for me, my otherwise strict Indian parents turned a blind eye to their son’s somewhat unusual appearance.
I remember when my friend Jenny turned up at our small and relatively comfortably privileged school in North Wales, with vertical hair and copious dark make-up. We all thought she was the coolest thing we had ever seen. We all wanted to know what she was. She was a Goth. Within days we were all Goths. We changed our appearance to look like Jenny as much as we could. We used make-up liberally, as and when we could. Our wardrobes were updated so as to comply with the uniform of the subculture, and of course we listened to the right music. Our identity was bound up in the music and we looked to the bands as guidance to how we should be looking ourselves. Our school files were covered with sellotaped cuttings of our favourite bands from the New Musical Express (NME), and we wrote band names and our favourite lyrics on our pencil cases and on just about everything else.
Where is he going with all this you might be asking yourselves? And what is the link with trans/detrans? The point I am getting to, is how subculture morphed from having its roots in music and bands, into something else. The advent of social media brought an end to music being the basis of youth subculture. Kids’ identities were no longer in the music they listened to but were now lodged in their social media profiles. The selfie-generation, along with initially Myspace, then Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and others, replaced bands and music, which were now relegated to merely music, something which kids listened to but served no other role, and certainly did not dictate their identity in the way that social media now did.
The time when this shift in subculture from music to social media took place could be mistaken for heralding the end of identifiable youth subcultures, with their relevant associated soundtrack, but this of course is not the case. These days when a kid turns up at school with unusual hair and make-up, they get the same response as we had to Jenny. The other pupils think that person is the coolest they have seen, and they want to join their subcultural tribe. But when asked what this identity is, instead of ‘Goth’, the response is that they are ’trans’ or ‘non-binary’. The collective response is the same as before and the kids on whom this has created a favourable impression then to go home and declare to their parents that they too are ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’, much to the surprise of their parents who had never seen any prior evidence of gender non-conforming or gender dysphoria in their child. This ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ (ROGD) is not a medical condition. It is a youth subculture.
My phrase that “ROGD is just Goth Mk V” has been quoted many times. Here is an explanation of what I mean by that. The different phases of Goth over time are less important but for those who really want to know, here goes. Goth Mk I was post Punk and quite harsh in appearance; we listened to Bauhaus and Siouxsie. Goth Mk II was a bit more light-hearted, and we listened to The Cure. This was followed by Goth Mk III which was when colours than black were entertained (for hair especially) and the music was more ‘shoegaze’, such as The Cocteau Twins. Goth Mk IV was the switchover from music to social media, and from this the ‘Emo’ (emotionally unstable) manifestation of Goth emerged, with all sorts of colours, still with strange hair but more emotional instability rather than just feigned existential misery. Goth Mk V is ‘trans/non-binary’ where the focus is on gender. All youth subcultures are about subversion. Subverting the normative frameworks given to us by our parents and society, which we then reject, is a way of navigating our individual journeys to our later adult selves.
All the phases in the evolution of Goth, and indeed its forerunner Punk, have one thing in common;, the subversion included how males and females were stereotypically supposed to look. In terms of appearance, it was always very gender non-conforming. If one looks at photos of Punks or Goths or Emos, they subvert gender frameworks in such a way that it is sometimes hard to tell what sex they are. I admit that in photos of me in my first year of medical school in London I had more make-up than any female peers, and at times possibly risked looking like some sort of bad transvestite, although that was never the aim, and it was never about gender. Much the same could be said of the New Romantics, where figures such as Steve Strange, Boy George and Marilyn challenged the notions of gender without ever declaring their biological sex to be under question. At no point did these men, who at times looked like quasi-women, declare that they were women, or even deny that they were men. Instead, they challenged our understanding of what a biological male could look like, by challenging frameworks and assumptions and expanding our repertoire of understanding of gender. These individuals were ‘gender confident’, knowing that their sense of sex and gender was not a ‘problem’, but something which could playfully be subverted. I have also had patients in therapy with me who resolved a previous gender dysphoria, and who described how they chose to reside within a social post-Punk musician identity, in order to achieve the freedom to subvert their appearance externally, whilst being internally satisfied by their gender non-conformity, and remaining under the radar of suspicion with regards their gender identity.
The kids who have this sudden onset of identifying as trans or non-binary gender have no history of having problems with their sense of gender. Rather like those of us who suddenly became Goths had no previous history of identifying as a Goth. As with any youth subculture, there is a sudden interest in anything related to the subculture which has spread via social contagion amongst a peer group. ROGD teenagers can usually name a friend who is identifying as trans or non-binary. This is the model via which it has spread amongst them. Ironically, kids currently identifying as ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’ are often less gender-subversive in appearance than their Punk, Goth, or New Romantic predecessors.
Unlike previous subcultures, the response of the wider system is very different. As described earlier the normal response to subversive teenage behaviour is either (as with my parents) to completely ignore it and presume it will go away, or to attempt to curtail it, such as when a school insists the teenager sticks to the dress code. With the current youth subculture of ROGD the wider system responds in an entirely opposite manner. Rather than ignoring or trying to curtail it, it responds by encouragement, reinforcement, and medicalisation. Rather than perceiving ROGD as a youth subculture like any other which preceded it, it misinterprets it as a medical condition and attempts to address it within a medical framework. Luckily for me as a teenager there was no such thing as a Goth Identity Clinic offering permanent bodily changes, otherwise I might have had permanently backcombed hair, lips tattooed a dark shade of purple and a surgical permanent eyeliner. Unfortunately for ROGD kids these days, such an equivalent service exists in the form of Child Gender Clinics.
ROGD kids are first told that their subculture is in fact a medical disorder and that their bodies are wrong, that they need to firstly undergo a chemical hormonal castration and then surgery, such as the removal of healthy breasts in girls and physical castration of boys. Schools embrace this with worrying enthusiasm, as do the parents who have been supposedly ‘well educated on gender issues’ by a documentary they once saw and now believe the false statistics and myths propagated by pro-trans activist groups. Such misinformation typically may incorrectly state that to deny a trans kid affirmation of their declared trans or non-binary status would result in suicide. This is of course a myth, but as it is unchallenged and repeated again and again people are unfortunately led to believe it.
Once the ROGD kid is placed on the medical pathway it is difficult to come off it. Any chance of puberty is denied by administering a chemical castration. This is the same kind of castration which adult homosexuals were subjected to during the Second World War, and which we now consider inhumane. It was portrayed, for example, in the film depicting the homosexual codebreaker Alan Turing, who was subjected to such a chemical castration to control his homosexuality. Whilst we now consider the chemical castration of those adult homosexuals as inhumane, we are seemingly happy to similarly chemically castrate young children, who would most probably otherwise grow up to be adult homosexuals. To sanitise these extreme life changing interventions, chemical castrations are referred to as ‘puberty-blockers’. Double mastectomies, where healthy breasts are removed from girls, is renamed ‘top surgery’. The stated lie about these ‘puberty blockers’ is that they are a reversible step, allowing children to avoid the apparent horrors of puberty, in order to give them more time to consider what further steps they would like to take. In reality, nearly 100% of children who are given ‘puberty blockers’ go on to take cross-sex hormones, the results of which can be irreversible, including facial hair and voice deepening in girls and the failure for genitalia to develop in boys. It seems that bypassing a normal puberty only reinforces any doubts a child has about the legitimacy of their biological sex.
In her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier describes how in some US States children are able to confide their new ‘trans’ status to their teachers who then facilitate clinical appointments to gender clinics without parental knowledge or consent. The first the parents may know of their child’s ‘transition’ may be the appearance of facial hair in their daughters or breast development in their sons. In America and some countries such as Australia, children have been removed from the care of their parents if they have posed any objection to their child’s gender transition. If left alone to experience puberty, its arrival may well serve to appease the child’s misapprehensions about their biological sex, and a supportive empathic therapeutic exploration with the child as to why they came to question their gender would help them to learn that their bodies are not ‘wrong,’ and to accept themselves. No child should be encouraged to believe that their body is wrong, and self-acceptance should always be the primary aim. Instead, parents and schools are told to support via an ‘affirmatory’ approach, which may literally sound to be accepting, but is in fact a reinforcement of the notion that these children have incorrect bodies which may be corrected by surgical removal of healthy breasts in girls, castration in boys and a lifetime of medical treatment and hormones.
Charities such as Mermaids have the aim of encouraging the medicalisation of ROGD kids, and despite having no clinicians, have controversially been giving kids tips on how to transition, often encouraging them to do so secretly without their parents being involved, and sending breast binders to girls to encourage them to shrink their breasts, similar to the practice of ‘breast ironing’ in some African societies or the previous custom of foot binding in China. When I worked for a couple of years at the Tavistock GIDS department as a Specialist Registrar, I was shocked as to how Mermaids were encouraged to be part of the treatment plan for the gender confused kids referred to them. Mermaids have long fought for greater and earlier access to chemical castration for children. Their former CEO has famously described on a TED Talk how she first arranged for her own son to access chemical castration and cross-sex hormones prior to flying him out of the country for a surgical ‘sex change’ operation which would not have been possible or legal in the UK at his age. In another online video she jokes about how her son’s penis was so small, due to the hormonal treatments, which when inverted as part of the ‘sex change’ operation, lead to him having a very small neovagina. The frivolity and humour with which she jokes about this is chilling to any therapist equipped with empathy for the child. To create a neovagina in a male, a space is created between the base of the removed penis and rectum. This space is then lined with the skin of the penis. If the child has not accessed puberty, they will not have had the usual growth of genitalia and so the resulting neovagina will be small, and often useless for sexual functioning. Sometimes it is made longer by sewing a section of removed bowel, which comes along with its own complications. Another risk is that if all this takes place without the child having gone through puberty and never having experienced a sexual orgasm, it is possible that that person will never be able to experience an orgasm later in life. It is beyond comprehension that whilst children are deemed not old enough to drink, smoke or vote, that somehow, they are deemed able to make decisions on irreversible decisions about their bodies which could lead to an inability to have sex or experience an orgasm.
Society has been led to believe that facilitating ‘sex changes’ for gender non-conforming kids is about inclusivity and acceptance of difference, but the reality is that this is a form of societal homophobia, ‘transing the gay away’ and creating a generation of adults whose bodies have been permanently altered and a lifelong need for medical interventions and hormones. Of these an unknown proportion will sooner or later come to regret these irreversible steps. ‘Mental Capacity’ refers to the ability to make a decision, based on understanding fully the implications of such a decision, being able to weigh up in the balance the potential benefits and risks of such a decision, and then be able to communicate their decision and their understanding of how they came to their decision. It is my firmly held clinical opinion that no child can have the mental capacity to give informed consent for any hormonal or surgical ‘sex changing’ procedures.
7. 1984 OUT BY 39 YEARS, OTHERWISE ACCURATE
I am probably not the only one to have revisited George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 recently, wanting to read it properly this time not like when we read it during our teenage years. If you have, then you will most certainly have been struck by how Orwell could well be describing what is happening today in terms of being told what and how to think, having our thinking ‘corrected’ and policed (literally in some cases). As a Gender Critical Psychiatrist who has worked, written, researched, published, tweeted and podcasted in the field for over twenty years (before it was ever topical or ‘cool’) the parallels between Orwell’s 1984 and Gender Ideology are striking.
Today, critical thinking is challenged by trite slogans which are repeated ad nauseum in the hope that via repetition the brain will be ‘washed’ of its previously critical and scientific thinking: ‘Transwomen are Women’, ‘Suck my Trans cock’, ‘Kill all TERFS’. In his excellent book, The New Puritans, Andrew Doyle compares Social Justice Theory to a modern-day religion where today’s kids are the Puritans acting as zealots to the faith. This is embodied in 1984 where ‘the Party’ and its doctrine can be likened to Social Justice Theory. The uncritical fanaticism observed in mainly those populating schools and universities (which are no longer institutions of critical thought but powerhouses of mass brainwashing) likened to the following uncritical Social Justice doctrine.
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was … they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatsoever to rebel against the discipline of the Party, and everything connected with it. The…processions, the banners…the yelling of slogans…All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State…traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals.” 1
Over recent years we have witnessed the steady erosion of what world consensus had arrived at in terms of biology, nature, science and reality. Thanks to Queer theory and its proclivity to subvert (or ‘queer’) normative frameworks of understanding, thousands of years of understanding reality have been replaced by pseudo-philosophical alternatives conjured up by the minds of those wallowing in the Liberal Arts in New England without any scientific background. Their ideas, whilst nonsensical to any person still grounded in scientific reality, have been given precedence and replaced scientific reality to an increasing extent. Now ‘women’ can have penises and ‘men’ can have a cervix, as confirmed by almost all MPs within the UK’s Green Party, Liberal Democrats and Labour Party whom either paid little attention in their school biology classes or have had their minds captured by Gender Ideology and their thinking ‘corrected’ in order to fit in with the doctrine.
