Mail - "Government probe into why so many girls want to be boys"

I'm hoping that the enquiry will be informed by real health professionals who are at the front line of this as well as qualified psychiatrists and endocrinologists and others as any other health related inquiry would be. I'm also hoping that it will be chaired by someone experienced and used to dealing with complex evidence. I'd love to see Stonewall, GIRES, Mermaids and others scrutinised instead of doing the scrutinising. Surely such crazy figures (4000 percent) should trigger that something very wrong is happening here and surely someone should see that this is a crisis needing to be averted?

Can't believe I find myself agreeing with a DM article. Think I need a lie down....

Honestly society is batshit!

As long as they keep using 'assigned female' it's going to be an uphill battle. Sex is not a bureaucratic process.

Some good comments on the times piece, including criticism of the govt. wording 'assigned female'

The Sunday times link unfortunately seems to be just getting the other article which was on the same page in the app; I'm not set up to do shared links from the browser. It's essentially the same story but also mentions:

Last month the junior equalities minister, Victoria Atkins, was criticised by transgender rights campaigners for expressing caution about those undergoing “serious and life changing” gender reassignment treatments.

the girls are expected to give the boys blow jobs at school
This makes me so sad. We have to step up to try and reverse this 'sex positive' brainwashing of young girls and women. I grew up in the seventies and of course there was plenty of sexism but teenage girls certainly knew they could say No, and that would be largely accepted. No to giving blow jobs if we didn't want to, No to posing for nude photos, No to kinks, etc etc.

My friend's daughter is 11. She said "it's better to be trans because the girls are expected to give the boys blow jobs at school" .

There needs to be a really thorough investigation into sexual pressures on young women and girls, and why safeguarding has been chucked out of the window.

Along with everyone else, I very much want transparency in this - not just on who's doing the enquiry, but who's funding it. Could we get an open letter to Penny Mordant organised, perhaps via one of the groups like FPFW (or all of them plus our individual voices - I'm sure there are health and education groups that would sign too)? I've no idea how you do such a thing. The govt have massively lost trust and they need to be squeaky clean here.

On a far lighter note, the pp who mentioned hair length - mine is long and greying naturally in my forties as a personal protest against ageism, really. When I was growing up I hated the idea that every older woman felt she had to lop it all off and keep it coloured; heaven forbid it should show any silver. I know a few women doing the same. Until recently I found it hard to love my greys, but there was...an incident, and now I see the streaks as something akin to warpaint. My daughters have super-long hair just because they think it's funny to be able to sit on it.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeffrey-archer-id-vote-for-jeremy-corbyn-in-the-north-8nr8xzhts?shareToken=106bb8d2202c2ee059715c719535f6ad

Also article in the times

Interesting about early puberty affecting this. I know Zoladex is used for really precocious puberty but the side effects are quite grim. zoladex

Maybe sometimes puberty happens earlier and is disconcerting even for a well informed child who usually copes well with change. Perhaps being offered something to hold time still for a while appeals
Maybe it’s an age/adjustment issue and whereas previously you just had to put up now you can choose not to go through it
Therapies at the moment I believe are zoladex to halt puberty but once stopped it carries on where it left off giving ‘breathing space’ to explore what the individual really wants.
Of course there are genuine cases of needing to transition but I do wonder how many are just an adjustment issue to something (puberty) which signals a new stage in life a child perhaps isn’t ready for and now there’s a way to avoid it

Great article. But the headline is wrong - it is a 4000% increase, not 4%.

4% won't draw the eye of the uninitiated. 4000% bloody well will.

They need to correct it.

good

but yes, let's hope some sense is shown in who is consulted

a good range of actual medical professionals qualified in related fields

the girls themselves

can't see any need to consult unqualified pressure groups

Harnaam Kaur is a real woman.

Anecdote: I once saw Kaur washing her hands in the women's lavatories at Euston. I wanted to tell her how much I admired her but thought she might find it a bit creepy.

Womanformally I'm not sure if there's been any research done into trauma in the childhoods of transgender people, preferably quantitative to compare with those who aren't transgender - after all, lots of people unfortunately have traumatic childhoods and don't have gender dysphoria or wish to change sex. But i am struck those fathers in the interviews etc i have come across. Paris Lees and Sarah Brown both talk/write about theirs: Aimee Challenor hasn't talked about their father but, as a convicted child abuser whose children were at times in care, David Challenor seems unlikely to have been a great dad. The narrative is that they as children were trans and that's why their fathers treated them so badly or they found the sexism/bullying/abuse so awful. Which sounds like a version of internalised self-blame to me. Like there is still a part of them that thinks if they hadn't been trans, they would have been accepted and not abused. Of course, from my perspective it looks as though their childhoods were so bad that they wanted to leave behind the people they were and be someone else - a dissociation/escape survival strategy. But then I'm a sad old cow who is not modern.

Good comment about them covering the girls' nipples but not the boys' - despite them being the same person.

Like others here - my concern is by whom it is being looked at - who will be advising them, who will they listen to and will the results, if they go against trans ideals, be accepted or blocked as we have seen of research already which goes against the party line.

Economist is also running the story.

I'm glad it's being looked at. It's not like these people will ever be accepted as real men, I think they are being set up.

I hated getting boobs. Hated being leered at on the bus, hated the boys in year 8 'rating' us on our sexiness. Hated periods, which any woman knows always seem to turn up every time I was on holiday or Scout camp. Hated being teased about assumptions about my pubic hair (I am a redhead), hated being told I was dirty for not shaving my legs, hated being frigid for not shagging my boyfriend and slutty when I did. It was rubbish even 15 years ago - it won't have got better.

I have a friend with MH issues who was subject to CSA for years who changed her name and cut everyone out in 6th form. We're back in touch now but it wasn't the fix-all cure she wanted. She was still her, demons and lovely qualities and all. I see a lot of transgenderism as similar, really.

Now a very happy 30 year old whose female biology has done me proud - I've breastfed for 6 years, had 3 lovely girls, have a husband who knows what a clitoris is... I hope the inquiry is genuine and not the disingenuous, biased stuff we've been used to seeing. Agreeing with The Daily bloody Mail and The Spectator - who'dathunkit?!

Well at least the "no debate" mantra is falling by the wayside. It is clear from all the comments that the average mail reader thinks it is madness, too much pressure to transition too young, socially engineered and the kids are being taught this at school and they wouldn't be wrong.

9th rule of misogyny: Men always know the "real reasons" for everything women do and say.

Funny

One of the comments:
My daughters ex wanted a boy. He treats their daughter as if she is a boy. Boys clothes, shoes and toys etc. Left like this she could have issues later in life. She is only 1!

It has been observed by others (evolutionary biologists) that domineering, controlling fathers are often the cause of confusion about sex in young people - the boys are taught they're not macho enough to be a boy and are too feminine, the girls think they should be boys to be acceptable.

As a 13-year-old girl she fell in love with another girl, leading to bullying. Yet it was only at 15 that Alex – now 22 – determined to change sex after being sent to an LGBT group called Over the Rainbow. There, the youngster was given information about how to transition on the NHS.

How is this not conversion therapy?