Trans issues in the UK

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Today at 60: Gender identity

"Janice Turner of the Times is one of those commentators who's been very outspoken about any change in the law. She thinks self identification will fundamentally change the legal notions about men and women.

'This will mean that tomorrow anybody who is a man could say I identify as a woman and they would then be allowed to use female services and to female private spaces. Changing rooms, theoretically into female scholarships. They will be, an immediate right to go into a women's prison from a men's prison because they say they are women. This is very problematic for women and I'm really concerned about the way women are not allowed to express their concerns and doubts about this...

There is a very angry lobby that denies there is any conflict of rights between women and transpeople on this issue but given that ninety percent of violent crime is committed by men and something like ninety six percent of sex crime is committed by men, there are issues here if such people can go into women's areas and be among women and girls...

I'm not bigoted at all. You know women like me, feminists like me have solidly supported gay rights and trans rights throughout our entire lives. We have solidly been behind progressive, sexually liberating things all of our careers. But there needs to be good law made here because otherwise there are consequences...

Being a teenage girl is a really difficult phase in your life because you see that, especially now, this very sexualized notion of being an adult woman and no wonder these girls are thinking: hang on a minute, I don't want this. I don't want to be this object of desire...

If they are channeling people to us taking hormones for life and hormone blockers, almost a hundred percent of people who take them to postpone puberty then go on to cross sex hormones, so you are putting children who, their identity isn't fully formulated, on a trajectory towards a lifetime on hormones... confusion is a natural consequence of adolescence'...

'I had a friend who came out to me as transgender and she started transitioning and that for me was really the trigger and so I did a lot of research on the internet. I became involved in various online communities and very gradually I decided that I, I was trans and I did need to do something about it and I immediately had a lot of people encouraging me to take hormones.

And so that's what I did on my own. Actually ended up buying them on the internet. Yeah I injected testosterone I think for about twelve months after which I realized that I wasn't comfortable with what was happening to me and I was also way out of my depth medically...

I just realized that the problem wasn't that I was uncomfortable with being female. It was that I was uncomfortable with the expectation that I should be feminine and I was also uncomfortable with the way I had been treated all the way through my life as a woman and that's what had pushed me into wanting to be a man and being convinced that that was what I had to do...

[Hormones] made me very hairy. I was quite hairy to begin with but I've ended up with quite a lot of hair on my face, particularly my chin which I have to pluck because I'm self conscious about it. And it also affected my voice. My voice is slightly lower than it used to be. I used to be a soprano and I was in the senior choir at school and I can't do that anymore because my voice breaks if I try and sing and I mean that's not a big deal or anything but it's a reminder of what I did to myself and how misguided I was. And I don't know about the effect it may have had on my fertility...

It's a reminder of what I did to myself rather unnecessarily and what I could have done to myself. You know I actually investigated the possibility of having top surgery in San Francisco'

'Having your breasts removed'

'Yes, yes and I was very much for it at the time. I hated my breasts. I really really hated them and I was convinced that having them removed would be the best thing I could do and I would have been very unhappy now I think as an adult...

I was twenty nine when I finally came to terms with my body and my identity and I'm very concerned that if I was a teenager now or if I was even younger now, that I would be pushed and my parents would be pushed to consider me as transgender. And actually I would have welcomed that at the time.

I wanted to be a boy when I was younger because boys were allowed to be assertive and confident. A young person now may take hormones or they may even have surgery and later regret it... by giving treatment to young children we may be perpetrating a great harm and we might look back on this in, in thirty or fifty years and see it as one of the you know great medical blunders of the twenty first century'...

'Transgendered charities argue that the risk of not treating children worried about their gender identity is even greater. They quote figures suggesting there's an unusually high suicide risk among them but some skeptics say it's impossible to prove cause and effect'...

The BMA has issued new guidelines suggesting pregnant women should not be called expectant mothers but pregnant people, in case anybody's offended. Many worry that we're getting it out of proportion and that it's being encouraged by a powerful and influential campaign...

Sixty years ago the word transgender had not even been coined. According to the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary didn't really enter our vocabulary until the seventies. The word non binary came much later, just a few years ago and the Women and Equalities committee has already called for non binary people to be protected under the Equalities Act...

Lord Nazir Ali, former bishop of Rochester, is appalled at the notion of a post gender world. He's attacked the NHS spending money freezing the sperm and eggs of teenagers before they've changed their sex. His overarching worry is what happens to families in such a world.

'The real concern here is for the children and we cannot produce children who will be confused about the roles of their parents, their fathers and their mothers. To plan for a situation where they don't know whether a particular parent is a father or a mother is asking for generational confusion and we don't know what the consequences will be not just for the people themselves but for future generations'...

'I think that it's this post modern construct of gender fluidity which is based on no rational thought, no scientific evidence. But somehow it's taken hold and it's changing perceptions. I mean for example now it's quite normal for our young children to be educated that you know transgender is completely normal. Now why this should be it is - I find it quite baffling to be honest... I'm not claiming for one second that I am necessarily right - what I am claiming is that there's no debate and there needs to be a discussion and a debate and these days all the debate seems to be just shut down'

"Research on the internet" probably means going on tumblr and getting all the pro-trans spiel

Children are not old enough to consent to sex, but they are old enough to consent to taking hormone blockers (and ask for euthanasia)


BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Gender dysphoria: How much do we know?

"I spoke to a woman who wanted to change her gender and eventually injected herself with hormones that she bought over the internet and then she began to regret her decision...

'You are concerned that children are being treated to early for conditions that we don't properly understand'

'I think my fundamental concern is that we haven't really defined what is really wrong'...

'There is a real risk in doing this because if you look at the results of gender reassignment the, the results are horrendous in so many, such a big proportion of cases. For example with vaginal reconstruction there are probably forty percent of people who have that have some complication, often need further surgery. Male reconstruction's very very difficult.

When you start taking off breasts, a large number of, probably twenty three percent according to a very recent paper feel uncomfortable with what they've done and I think those sorts of issues are important. Then of course what I have been seeing of course in a fertility clinic are the long term results of often very unhappy people who now feel quite badly damaged...

When you're doing any kind of medicine where you are trying to do good not harm and looking at the long term effects of what you might be doing and for me that is really a very important warning sign'


Backlash at Lord Winston over gender operations warning

"His comments attracted anger from activists on Twitter, who called him a ‘terrible c***’ and said he was ‘not qualified’ to talk about the issue.

It comes amid a mounting debate over whether children and teenagers who believe they have been born with the wrong body should have medical intervention. A record 50 children a week are now being referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the UK’s largest clinic of its kind, hosted by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London...

Trans woman and BBC employee Rachel Evans said: ‘Disappointed that my employer has, once again, apparently just broadcast an inaccurate, misleading attack on trans kids. PLEASE DO BETTER... One critic called Catherine who described herself as a ‘trans woman’ with an engineering PhD said: ‘Robert Winston talking bulls*** about trans surgery. Robert Winston is in no f****** way qualified to talk about trans people, he is a fertility doctor.’"

Science is transphobic

Presumably an engineering PhD is more qualified to talk about the medical aspects of trans people than a fertility doctor