Great article by Helen Joyce, a good one to share to people who are out of the loop.
standpointmag.co.uk/issues/february-2020/speaking-up-for-female-eunuchs/
The woes of “detransitioners” are a warning: treating children with gender dysphoria is riskier than zealots admit
Extracts:
"Taking [puberty blockers] to halt normal adolescence would offer time to reflect before irreversible physical changes happened, the thinking went, and make it easier for children to alter their bodies to mimic the opposite sex in adulthood.
As activists pressed for such treatment, clinics elsewhere took it up with enthusiasm. Emerging evidence, however, suggests that this supposedly cautious treatment is anything but. Almost every child who has ever taken such “puberty blockers” has progressed to cross-sex hormones, with lifelong consequences. Even if a child grows up into a contented transgender adult, skipping natal puberty may permanently harm brain development, and probably causes brittle bones. Worst, it means certain sterility.
The Tavistock’s move towards the Dutch protocol prompted alarm. 35 clinicians left. One of them, Kirsty Entwistle, who worked at a satellite clinic in Leeds, was in the audience in Manchester: “I knew there would be detransitioners,” she says, “but I thought it would be in 10 years’ time when the reality of infertility set in.”
“I regret it all,” says a slight 23-year-old in a lumberjack shirt, hunched behind a microphone. She is one of eight young detransitioners from several European countries here in Manchester. All are lesbian. They, and many in the audience, see the doctors and clinicians who supported their transitions as the post-modernist version of those who sought to turn gay people straight—only now they are seeking to fix bodies rather than sexual desires. “Transition has been presented as so progressive, but the only thing I see is it reinforcing gender stereotypes,” says one.
“If there is a ‘gay conversion therapy’ of our times, it’s this,” says Charlie Evans, the network’s founder, who identified as trans for a decade before switching back last year, aged 28. Of the 300 or so detransitioners who responded to her social-media call some months ago, most were young and female."