The costs of telling the truth too late

Imagine you are a child who really, really hates being a boy. You despise your sexed body, feel alienated from it, dread the thought of becoming a man. You don’t yet know the difference between masculinity and maleness, that accepting your sex need not be the same as conforming to rigid norms. To learn this you need love and support from the adults around you. But imagine if, rather than offer it, all of these adults kept saying “yes, you must be a girl – and anyone claiming otherwise must want you dead”. 

Imagine if they told you that your interest in  “feminine” things proved, not the arbitrariness of gender stereotypes, but that you were born in the wrong body. Imagine if they claimed that with the right medication and surgery, you could avoid puberty and ultimately change sex. Imagine if they said that access to the language, resources and spaces of the opposite sex was not only your birthright, but that anyone who sought to deny you this must hate you. Imagine if they insisted that untold numbers of people — priests, feminists, left-wingers, right-wingers, grannies, famous children’s authors — were plotting your demise every time they suggested your body was not the problem. 

If it was your mum doing this — backed up by teachers, medical professionals and other trusted folk — you’d believe her. Not just because she was validating your own anxieties, but because these would be insane claims to make if they weren’t true. No loving parent would tell a child they could literally change sex — or that no one really knew what sex anyone was anyways — unless they were certain of it. No parent would encourage them to see hate that wasn’t there. Because those would be truly horrendous things to do. 

And yet, here we are. 

In response to the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of “woman” Girlguiding has given six months for male members to leave an organisation whose charitable purpose is to promote the education and development of girls and young women. This will cause pain to any children directly affected, pain that is hardly eased by headlines presenting this as a deliberate choice to exclude and marginalise “transgender girls”. Then again, a blunter way of putting it — “boys told to leave girls’ organisation” — wouldn’t be a vast improvement. However small the number, we are talking about boys who have been affirmed in their belief that they are not boys, and that any attempt to define them as such is driven by hate. Countless adults — and many in Girlguiding itself — have done this. How does one help these children now?

If you were a certain type of Guardian columnist, your response might be to say that we should just find a way to ensure girls no longer have clubs of their own. Problem solved! Unless of course you still care about girls (which is always a terrible inconvenience, but some of us are difficult that way). The Supreme Court ruling does not mean that there can be no organisations in which boys and girls do things together, and certainly not that boys and girls shouldn’t challenge gender stereotypes (“girls must always prioritise male feelings” being one of them). In an ideal world, girls sometimes organising without the presence of boys — and vice versa — wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s such a small thing to ask. The thing that has inflated it, and made it so fraught, is over a decade of adults lying to vulnerable children and calling it “kindness”.

How does one untangle it now? How can you tell a trans-identified boy that yes, he should absolutely be allowed to defy gender stereotypes but that one way of doing so would be to respect girls’ boundaries? How can he do that when you’ve spent the past few years insisting that even noticing adult human females exist as a meaningful category puts his life at risk? How do you tell him that no, he can’t change sex? Or that plenty of people who’ve been saying this aren’t hate-filled bigots, but very happy to support him in challenging sexism and homophobia, which are not things you do through acts of lifelong self-harm? There is no way of telling a trans-identified boy he can no longer be a girl guide without destroying his trust in the very adults who’ve spent years telling him that the rest of the world is out to destroy him. 

The honest thing for an adult trans ally to do would be to say “well, I might have exaggerated a bit. At the start I thought this was the same as gay rights and feminism. From a distance trans activism looked like a more extreme version of defying gender norms, then by the time it started looking a bit dodgy — kind of like the opposite of that — I was too committed to owning the TERFs and defending medical experiments on children. I should have done more to support gender questioning kids instead of making them more afraid”. For instance, if Labour’s Nadia Whittome was a better person, she might have done that, rather than stand up in the House of Commons to scaremonger a bit more, conflating the Guiding decision with bullying, “throwing people under the bus” and “policing people’s gender”. Did she think about how this would make the children involved feel? Beyond, that is, whether or not this would keep them on “her” side? 

There are adult males who have used gender self-ID selfishly and deliberately. Children and teenagers are a different matter. They have been used and deceived, and there is no way of undoing the harm without causing them further distress. Of course, it may be less distress than if one were to continue down the same path as before. A tweet from the account @wokeandwoofing put it fairly succinctly:

 I brainwashed my son into thinking he was a girl. Chemically castrated him with puberty blockers. Then persuaded him to have his penis cut off. And now the Girl Guides won’t let him in. How could anyone be so cruel to a child?

Activist adults need to put their self-interest to one side and start telling the truth

In many ways this gets to the nub of the issue. Everyone else is supposed to mitigate the extreme harm caused to these children because it can’t be undone. Girls not having their own boundaries and resources is a “minor” issue compared to a boy having to come to terms with the fact that his parents, teachers and doctors lied to him, made him feel persecuted and destroyed his future health. Indeed, by the same logic, even more children must be lied to and harmed, just to “prove” that what was done to the first group wasn’t a mistake. 

At some point it has to stop. As a long-time critic of gender identity ideology, I know and hate the fact that this will cause enormous upset to some children. I want what I always wanted — for these children to be loved, supported, encouraged to be different, content in their own bodies, and trusting of others. It’s not people like me who took that away from them. Hopefully some repair is possible. For that, activist adults need to put their self-interest to one side and start telling the truth.