The gender agenda

A friend recently told me she spent four years of her childhood living as a boy. ‘I hated dresses, cut my hair, gelled it and spiked it,’ she says. ‘From aged eight, I thought I was meant to be a boy. I remember going into a swimming pool changing room in board shorts and the girls shrieking: “It’s a boy!”’

It wasn’t until my friend hit puberty that she began to feel more comfortable in her gender. By her mid-teens she was living happily as female. Now she’s a married mother of three who looks back on her tomboy phase with an air of amusement. Yet she shudders to imagine what might have happened if she’d been a child going through the same thing today.

Over the past 30 years, our attitudes towards gender and transgenderism have shifted dramatically. A greater acceptance of LGBT equality means that more adults are now living as a gender different to their birth sex. But what approach should we take to children who exhibit so-called ‘gender-nonconforming’ behaviours? Should we be so ready to accept a child’s declaration that they want to live as the opposite gender? And should we grant them access to medical treatments (such as puberty-blocking drugs) which would enable that in the future?

Some think so. In the past few decades, the number of children being referred to specialist gender services has increased dramatically. Referrals to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Services (GIDS) — the NHS’s only gender identity service for children — have jumped 1,000 per cent since 2012 (up to 2,700 this year). Of those referred, 50 per cent will go on to have medical intervention, starting with puberty blockers, which are intended to give them time to mull over their decision. Nearly all who take blockers will progress to hormone treatment at 16 and gender reassignment surgery at 18.

But is the rise down to a more accepting attitude towards all things transgender, or is something more worrying at play? Over the past year, senior medical professionals have come forward to express their concerns that an over-readiness to recognise young people as transgender could be leading to vulnerable children — and in particular young girls — being wrongly referred for life-changing treatments.