Europe's trans lobbyists won't answer this question
Are you advocating for children to be able to choose surgeries and hormones without a mental health evaluation?
Remember those funny plastic toy dogs people used to put in the back of their cars, and the dog’s little head would nod up and down with the movement of the car? That’s trans affirming healthcare.
You decide on your body modification goals, and the doctor is the nodding dog. But you won’t hear it described like that by the lobbyists. And they also won’t tell you that this is what they want for children, too.
The shopping catalogue model of healthcare
The general public thinks that grown men who claim to be women have to go through a battery of psychological assessments before they are granted access to womanhood. If you spend any time following this issue, you know this is not true. A lot of people also think that men are required to spend some living as a woman before they are handed the keys to our identity. Again, no.
What would the general public think if they found out that the goal of organisations like TGEU, ILGA-Europe and the increasingly deranged Council of Europe’s gender identity team want anyone, including kids, to be able to change their official sex simply by filling in a form? That’s is already possible in some countries, and is making its way through the legal systems of others. (Here’s what the form looks like in Belgium, btw. Note the signature for parents added haphazardly in at the end).
Doctor shopping for puberty blockers on Facebook
And what if the public knew that anyone can get their hands on hormones and surgical appointments, without any kind of mental health oversight, as long as they know which doctor to go to? There are plenty of doctors who will sign off on your affirmative care surgery and hormone wishlist after one or two visits. You can get whatever you want.
“Gender clinics” are really starting to look like a smokescreen, a sanitiser of the sordid and sad gender industry, as well as a place for ambitious doctors to churn out citable shite that gets them invited to all the cool conferences. Yes, the vaunted “gender teams” are multidisciplinary and have mental health pros, but the waiting lists are long and people don’t want to wait. Someone who has their heart dead-set on transition, say a 14-year-old autistic masculine-presenting lesbian who just got her first period, is going to threaten suicide unless her mother brings her to the doctor she learned about on TikTok.
That is the reality on the ground.
Personally, I think adults can remove whatever body parts they want, but private Facebook groups are full of people sharing the names of doctors who will give children what they want. The screenshot below is an exchange between two mothers in Belgium. One is asking the group how to get puberty blockers for her ten-year-old. “You will not be disappointed,” says a respondent about a certain doctor who *allegedly* sees patients in the Brussels neighbourhood of Anderlecht. His name gets shared in the Facebook groups in France, too, such is the ease with which he will *allegedly* whip out the prescription pad.
Here’s a representative of Transgender Equality Network Ireland *seemingly* advising someone how to get puberty blockers.
And don’t get me started on GenderGP who are still shipping hormones all over Europe.
What the trans advocates want: complete depathologisation
The trans lobby groups don’t want parents sharing this information in private groups. They want complete depathologisation and bodily integrity so that anyone of any age can transition medically with no questions asked.
They see a role for mental health professionals, but only to accompany transgender people on their journey. In October, in the European Parliament, an activist called Richard Kohler (TGEU) sat in front of a sympathetic committee (watch the hearing here) and asked for support to convince national European governments to follow the WHO’s example and take transgenderism out of the mental health category. They want it filed under something else, namely sexual health. Seems fair enough?
But an MEP called Cesar Luena, the committee co-chair, says in his introductory remarks that “the idea of this hearing is to take a look at the role medical services can play to make sure gender non-conforming and non-binary people are not discriminated against in the health sector… we want to give them access to healthcare without discrimination.”
There you have it.
In trans advocacy, there is a lot talking out of the side of your mouth. What looks like a request to stop requiring people to see a shrink, or get sex reassignment surgery/sterilisation before a legal sex change, quickly turns out to be a demand for the right to an aesthetic and hormonal shopping spree for adults and kids. It’s right there in their materials. They don’t even like the term “gender dysphoria” anymore. They say they support the aims of something called the Stop Trans Pathologization (STP), which calls for the removal of gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder categories from WHO classification, even though STP doesn’t seem to be a real thing that exists (the hyperlink brings you to a Sydney-based shipping freight company).
It’s a body modification movement.
I wrote to the EP committee chair to ask him if he was aware what they were asking for. No answer. Healthcare is not an EU competence, as they say in the lingo, which is why the plea to the European Parliament simply seems like an effort to drum up vocal support (which they absolutely got). But perhaps these advocates are looking for a legislative opportunity to change regulation that links the legal and medical sides of transgenderism? I have no idea, and this is possibly a very dumb take. But tying to get policy nerds to answer questions about this kind of thing when you’re openly gender critical is simply not possible.
In this tweet thread, it looks like MEP Silvia Modig is asking that trans people be treated respectfully and attentively by doctors etc, a commendable demand. However, further down the thread she bemoans the fact that mental health diagnosis is required for surgeries and hormones.
No more diagnoses. Continue to basket
They want help telling EU governments: drop the need for diagnoses and let us get on with modifying our bodies (and the bodies of our children) on the insurer’s dime.
But that brings me to a stupid question: if it’s not a mental illness, then why would it be covered by insurance? It’s a tricky one. On the one hand these children are so distressed they need those hormones or they will literally kill themselves. On the other hand, it is not a mental illness, stop calling it a mental illness, stop treating people like they are mentally ill - but please also sign these forms so that my insurance will cover my daughter’s expensive Adam’s apple shaving surgery or she will kill herself?
A doctor friend suggested that their retort might be that the body is wrong, not the mind. “Equally bonkers,” she added.
“It doesn't make any sense.”
I asked Irish psychotherapist Stella O’Malley of Genspect to explain this to me. “There is a contradiction at the heart of this issue which is the idea that trans activists want to depathologise gender dysphoria and pretend that being trans is the same as being gay.”
“However being trans requires a lifetime of medical treatment and it’s very different to being gay for a wide variety of reasons. And so, according to activists this is a condition that should not be viewed as a mental health condition but instead a social condition that needs medical treatment.”
“It doesn't make sense.”
“It's based on a mixture of two theories that are incompatible with each other: Queer Theory and Gender Identity Theory. The entire premise is completely incoherent.”
Gender Dysphoria is a very distressing condition that benefits from psychotherapy, she says, and lying to people by telling them that it can only be treated by medical treatment is really harmful to vulnerable people.
WPATH and their fake-believe clinical document
Standards of care are an actual thing with a definition and a purpose O’Malley (more artfully) explained on her recent podcast episode. But WPATH’s standards of care version 8 (known as SOC 8) is a steaming great pile of political manifesto. WPATH itself seems to be a front. There is nothing about it that suggests it is a trusted professional body (it has no research base, for a start), but governments keep quoting it for cover anyway. (I may be poisoned by cynicism but I am sure they keep their website that shitty looking because they don’t want you to clock that they are a front for plastic surgeons and sex therapists.)
I’m not going to rehash O’Malley’s rehash into the background of this insane SOC document (you should listen to the podcast), only to say that apparently it used to have some credibility, but the doctors jumped ship long ago and it’s been left to the activists.
There is plenty of wild stuff in the SOC 8, but most notably (apart from the eunuchs, of course) they have left out any age limits for any kind of transgender interventions. As O’Malley points out, this is probably a way to avoid blame in future, inevitable, lawsuits.
It’s all language games
The entire trans/gender ideology insanity rests on manipulation of language. Here’s a good example: I asked TGEU: do you advocate for kids to get hormones and surgery without getting checked for other mental health problems? They answered: children don’t ever get transgender treatments. It sounded familiar. I realised Jesse Singal had noted this in a recent podcast episode, too: when they say children, they don’t count adolescents i.e. anybody from onset of puberty to the age of 18.
It’s so dumb yet so simple. When I realised what they were up to, I said yeah ok but what about people going through puberty then? Another snarky response, telling me to refer to their first answer. By the time I asked a third time, they had googled me and I was told I wouldn’t get any answer from them any more.
I thought this was a major red flag. When they say “children” they hope you won’t notice that in their terminology, this only refers to pre-pubescent children. Which allows them to say “children” are not being hormonised (only the benign-sounding socially transitioned).
I asked the same question to ILGA-Europe (another powerful lobby) and the main TGEU advocacy guy. I also asked Anne Lou De Vries (Dutch protocol designer) about what seems on the outside like a contradiction of philosophies. She kindly told me she is too busy to get into it.
None of the lobbyists or MEPs got back to me.
So what’s a worried parent to do? The Human Rights Council, who every committed TERF knows is the mothership of trans lobbying, tell worried parents that basically, if you can’t tell whether your child is trans, go to one of the practitioners on this approved list of affirming doctors and you will be able to “find out”. Assuming parents are only going there because their child is suffering from some kind of dysphoria, there is only one possible outcome of such a meeting.
It’s OK. As long as we can all agree to redefine the meaning of the word “child”, there will be no children getting irreversible puberty blockers and surgeries.