Childline suggest female 'have a surrogate mother carry the baby for you'

[ArabellaScott]

A child* asks for advice on pregnancy. Childline's response includes the suggestion of surrogacy.

'im trans ftm and i want to have biological kids when im older but i don't want to get pregnant as this will likely trigger my dysphoria. Do you know what i could do?'
...
'The second option is to either adopt or have a surrogate mother carry the baby for you, which is what many men who can’t father children themselves do'

www.childline.org.uk/get-support/ask-sam/friends-relationships-and-sex-asksam/transgender-pregnancy/

• presuming this is a child, given that it's 'Childline'.

Under his eye.

I'm very surprised that Childline still have all this up there. They were being touted as some kind of wondrous solution when The Times broke the Discord story. But their history in this space has been known for a long time.

Trans charity’s chatroom for children condemned as irresponsible free-for-all

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bb4574c0-40e5-11ed-a7af-c587dcb7526e?shareToken=90a09dfed9a87e4ca540d16698561ac2

"Confidential safe spaces can be vital lifelines for children to access support in the charity sector. Childline, for example, allows children to communicate anonymously with each other on message boards, subject to strict controls.

There is a time delay before a child’s post goes live, allowing moderators to screen the content. The house rules set clear parameters for discussion, forbidding any posts that talk, for example about self-harm as a coping method, or suggest that running away might be the right choice. Medical advice is forbidden — “even if something is safe for one person, it might not always be safe for other people” — and no posts are allowed about target-driven goals to change body shape as “it can make people feel competitive and encourage people to diet in unhealthy ways”. Children are not allowed to share any other ways to contact each other off the boards, and, crucially, the message boards are public."

Sometimes I feel like tearing my brain out strip by strip with the total and utter nonsense people are spouting. Men who cannot have babies??? NO MEN CAN HAVE BABIES. NONE. WOMEN ARE NOT TEST TUBES

FUCKING [redacted redacted definitely redacted] HELL.

I hadn't seen that, Rex. Thanks.

I've been watching Childline for a while

Because you’re male living in a female body, you don't have the sperm to make a baby

I mean, seriously?! This is from 2021. When did people start moving away from the “born in the wrong body” mantra?

For you, things sound like they're slightly different because you’re actually in a position to possibly have children of your own

”Slightly different”?!

And then there’s the horror of normalising surrogacy.

If this is a child, where’s the advice about the impact of hormone treatments on fertility? Or the importance of not going down the mastectomy route to prevent the possibility of breastfeeding grief?

None of these people should be allowed to counsel children.

'The second option is to either adopt or have a surrogate mother carry the baby for you, which is what many men who can’t father children themselves do'

Senseless. Whether or not a man is able and willing to father a baby himself, he still can't become a parent without a woman.

Anyway, surely, if men in heterosexual marriages/relationships (the vast majority) can't father children, the couple would most likely consider a sperm donor? Why would an infertile father in a straight relationship require a surrogate because of HIS inability to father a child if his wife/partner has no fertility issues of her own?

I'm sure Childline do some good work, but they've always been under a massive cloud for me because of the somewhat 'potentially questionable' history of their founder.

This kind of thing clearly gives the lie to the claim that everybody understands that they can't actually change their biological sex. It's obvious that a great many - especially children and young people - DO genuinely believe that they can function in ways that only people of the opposite sex exclusively can, if they just 'identify' into that sex (yes, they refer to it as 'gender', but we all know what implications and mission-creep are assumed and demanded).

I've been watching Childline for a while

I am not accusing anybody of anything here, but I wonder if they received any calls from children who were being abused by a certain vile DJ and marathon runner and they weren't satisfactorily investigated to a successful conclusion?

The child asked the question and it is, imo, irresponsible for the Childline rep to answer without giving the full truth:

• The most reliable (although obviously nothing is guaranteed) way for the questioner to be able to have their biological children when they are older is to ensure that they preserve their fertility and are aware of the affects of any interventions that they get during transition on that.
• If they are attracted to women then they may be able to use egg retrieval and IVF to enable their partner to carry their biological child if they have maintained their fertility or arranged for egg retrieval earlier
• If they are attracted to men then it is not very likely that they would be able to find a surrogate to carry their child without incurring a large cost. There are not that many women who want to carry a pregnancy for someone else. What celebrities are able to do does not reflect the reality for your average UK person and there is no guarantee that the regulatory landscape will be the same in the future.
• Adoption is extremely hard, would mean giving up on the idea of having a biological child so not relevant to the question.

It is incredibly irresponsible to say "well there's surrogacy" as if you can just order up a womb on the NHS.

Ah yes, the age old response, you can just adopt a child it's bloody hard to adopt, and that is the easy bit. Parenting an adopted child is exhausting. Accessing support for an adopted child is even more exhausting. Every bloody year, having the same conversations with the class teacher, until they finally get it and repeat the same words back to you, as it is some sort of revelation is just so tiring.

Good call Childline - to reccomend this as a syraightforward option to a chid. Maybe childline should also suggest she reads Tracy Beaker as research or watch Annie or Matilda.

This is appalling advice. Surrogacy should never be recommended as a general solution like this, like oh, it's so easy! It's ethically complex (which this stupid recommendation ignores), and incredibly expensive, so will be out of reach for the vast majority.

It's another example of this particular ideology's complete reliance on everyone else to pander to one person's delusions, regardless of the cost of doing so to everyone else.

This. All this.

It's despairing isn't it? To know that a children's safeguarding charity is so captured by this ideology that they fail to offer children accurate health / medical information in a thoughtful and responsible way. Which is the baseline expected from them.
Instead vulnerable and mentally unwell children have organisations like the paedophile adjacent Mermaids and Childline. 😓

Indeed it is MrsO.

It's another example of this particular ideology's complete reliance on everyone else to pander to one person's delusions, regardless of the cost of doing so to everyone else.

Very well said @Speedweed

The other important thing to remember about Childline is how they're essentially part of the NSPCC. The NSPCC is the only charity with statutory powers to intervene. If they are getting this wrong, it's a problem. And one only need look to Scotland and their plans to criminalise parents under their conversion therapy plans, to see where this can lead.

They are worth watching and mentioning if writing to MPs. I usually try to include them when I do.

James Esses in the Spectator:

www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-childline-was-captured-by-trans-ideology/

"If the vulnerable children in our society are not safe contacting Childline, where are they safe?"

I have just read this article and am shocked beyond words. Childline ought to be closed down for using itself to promote an ideology in this way - instead of helping the poor children who telephone saying they are ‘trans’ but who we know may well be expressing all sorts of other deep seated problems though the lens of this self-diagnosis.

These problems could include sexual abuse, being in care, other traumas, being autistic, living among homophobic people when they may be gay, or simply being confused because of being non-conforming to any stereotype.

Which minister would be in charge of this?

By the way, have you seen the petition against teaching children ‘gender identity’ ideology in their RSE lessons at schools, very often outsourced to providers who do not allow parents to see the materials?

In the Spectator article James Esses writes about what children looking up Childline’s page on ‘gender identity’ will find:

Childline expressly state that: ‘some people’s gender identity doesn’t match what’s recorded at birth’. This immediately conflates the notions of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and suggests a narrative to vulnerable children that it is possible to be born in the wrong body. They go on to say that: ‘gender identity isn’t just male or female. Some people can identify as non-binary’. This contradicts the fundamental truth that sex is binary.

This is the petition against teaching ‘gender identity’ ideology in RSE lessons in schools, often outsourced with no parental scrutiny allowed because the providers say it is against their commercial interests.
To sign
⬇️
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/618970

Toby Young has 260k followers and has tweeted about James's case:

twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1612106381036773376?s=46&t=rI2UU85Iqclk3B3OVhEzlw

<waits to be told any kind of fraternisation with Toby Young is wrong>

Very much off the topic, but I am struck with the way the female body is now so thoroughly commercialised, both in reproductive and in sexual services at the same time as it is linguistically erased.

a very succinct summation.

A child is clearly thinking through the physical consequences of being trans and is told yeah you can chop off your breasts, take hormones and then hire another woman who is too poor to have much time to worry about gender and have her take the physical risk of giving birth. lots of men do this so it must be ok.

And whenever someone suggests adoption as a handy way of getting a child I feel quite ill. It completely ignores the deep trauma of the adopted child and the problematic complex role of the adoptive parent. (to say nothing of the trauma of the biological mother).

Flag at Childline HQ:

twitter.com/jamesesses/status/1612512597374296073?s=46&t=PW_5rL5EwisuNZ9ViaXe8Q

Childline have been a problem for at least 5 or 6 years. They used to recommend Mermaids as a resource, had (have?) noted homophobe Fox Fisher giving advice in a YouTube clip on their website, told both boys and girls that girls could not expect to have privacy from boys who identify as girls, etc etc. Horrifying stuff.

They even admitted at the time they started giving out this dangerous guff as advice that they had no internal expertise, just basically cut and pasted from what the likes of Mermaids were telling them to do. Where was their due diligence?