Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times

[Lovelyview]

Asks 'Will the Trans activists ever accept they lost?' https://archive.ph/9UasY Cheered me up this morning. (Although I'm not quite so sure this thing is done and dusted)

‘Two plus two equals unicorns’.
I bloody love Hadley.

Thanks for posting. Health does seem to have a bit more of an end-of-tunnel feeling. My concern is Health and Education pulling in different directions in government. Interesting times.

Love Hadley. She’s not pulling any punches there. Sharp, factual, to the point.

Time is the great healer. but it is going to take a lot of time to uproot that which has already been planted. There are a lot of people, including children, caught up in this now

To accept you were. "wrong" would imply that you had a solid rationale and an opennesss to reason, in the first place. True believers will cling on, seeing this as a test of and a challenge to their faith. So they will double down......even in the face of mounting evidence which disproves their foundational beliefs. They will become ever more intransigent - and this will incrementally lead to them being sidelined from mainstream organisations.

shes right that the reason parents won't admit they've got it wrong is because it's the same as admitting they've assisted their autistic/traumatised child in ruining their mental and physical health. Many of them become loud transactivists too, trying to convince other parents to carry out the same awful behaviour they have, to justify their own mistreatment of their kids. It's very sad and abuse is the only word for it.

helen joyce was absolutely correct that parents are culpable here. Their refusal to push back against their child's wishes to take blockers or even just to socially transition (we know how hard it is to come back from that) is a huge reason for why the ideology has been allowed to spiral out of control

Yes, three different conflicting vectors are opening up.

If schools and universities continue to teach and embed gender ideology then there will continue to be children and young adults who identify as trans......but they will not be able to access vital 'trans healthcare' because of the ban on blockers.

Meanwhile easier Self Id will simply accelerate and increase the level of conflict with the rights and protections of women and girls. Failure to ensure truly single sex services and spaces will result in further court cases and legal actions.

It's a mess......

There are undoubtedly some parents who have supported or encouraged without advice from doctors or specialists, but I think we do have to remember many parents may have sought advice from someone they trusted as a professional, e.g. psychologists or people claiming to be specialists in gender medicine, e.g Helen Webberley and others, who may have taken an affirmative only approach and convinced them that was the right thing to do. Those parents have been badly let down.

Thanks for this OP, it always brightens my day to read what she has to say.

Hadley getting it right again, of course. Thanks for sharing, we might not be out of the woods yet but there is certainly plenty of sunlight coming through.

I know plenty of parents who have enthusiastically embraced new pronouns, names, social transitions, even medication. My charitable side says they genuinely believe in the trans stuff as a new frontier in the LGB movement, but it also does get to make them extra special sparkly cool parents.

I completely agree @Nomnomnew but I struggle to understand why anyone with any level of common sense wouldn't see that stopping puberty in a healthy child is a very bad idea and that telling young children that they can change sex is an impossible idea.
My own (now adult) daughter said when she was 8 years old that she wanted to be a boy. It was a very short lived phase which I responded to with a simple "that's not possible, you're a girl with short hair and that's all" and she's always been a girl. Is now a 25 year old woman in a predominantly male profession, living her best life. She cringes when she looks back.

I guess the ‘totally reversible’ bullshit has been rolled out so often that it’s felt reassuring to believe it.

Excellent article, thanks.

Excellent from Hadley, as usual. DH read it this morning and actually brought it up in conversation with me He was especially struck by her point (new to him, old hat to us) about those parents who have destroyed their children's health and now have to live with what they have done by becoming the most swivel-eyed true believing activists.

Then he said "All this will stop when they prosecute the ringleaders and throw them in prison" and I had to explain "Oh you sweet summer child, literally almost every institution and sector are infiltrated and captured."

I disagree with abuse. The majority of parents will allow their children too indulge in low-level dangerous behaviour (eg trying a drink) in order to either dissuade them or teach them to manage it.

We need someone (Councils. NHS, charities) to start setting up support groups, family, individual or both, for detransitioners so they can publicly get the help they need.

They seem to be winning at the moment. They just got stopped from using puberty blockers on other people (children).

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed that except for the hubristic title. But Hadley probably didn't write the title.

That was a good read this morning.
I do wonder whether the shift in parenting styles - you are your child's best friend etc - has made it much harder for some parents to say no to their children? If you never use the no word, boundaries are endlessly negotiated and children have a sense that their needs take priority, then this must be an impossible issue to negotiate.
Instead of telling children they can't change sex, saying no to PBs etc some parents have to navigate this from a position of not being the authority figure. They've never said "no because I say so", "while you live under my roof I decide what's best for you" etc. Life's a constant compromise - except with this they're compromising their child's future mental and physical heath, fertility etc. And with the online "glitter community" encouraging parental alienation. it's very frightening. So maybe the alternative becoming the child's cheer leader seems the only option?

@ZeldaFighter if you think about the difference between manslaughter and murder, perhaps the word abuse is incorrect in this context as the parents are carrying out abuses unknowingly. Just as someone can accidentally kill someone by dangerous driving, someone can accidentally send their child down a path to an identity crisis and life long medicalisation. They're not gleefully setting their kids on a path to being a lifelong medical patient. They've inadvertently drunk the kool aid and trusted so called professionals. They must take some responsibility though because it's a batshit thing to medicalise a child's struggle with their identity and go defcon 2 in responding to it. I refuse to let parents off the hook entirely and say that they don't have any role in pushing this agenda further. I know of a fair few parents on a personal level who've managed to push back despite bloody "professionals" from captured membership bodies trying to confuse them with gender woo.

exactly this ☝️

As a parent of teens, there is definitely a sense of there being a lot of resource on offer for teens whose parents do NOT affirm a new gender identity, and it’s easy to imagine schools being very pastorally supportive to a child who tells their teachers about their horrible unsupportive parents (bearing in mind the school generally barely knows any of the parents) after encouragement from online sources. It’s quite scary really, how difficult it is to challenge this stuff with love, when you’re painted as bigots who want to drive your kid into desperation.

I think what the whole trans issue highlights is that societies who think of themselves as progressive still feel uncomfortable with gayness, really hate lesbianism, and still prefer when people fall in with sexual stereotypes. Most of these parents would rather have a child who can be corrected than a child who is unconventional.

It is a good article but I don't like the framing of winning and losing. It's too antagonistic.

I understand you point but if there's one thing I've learned in the past 8 years following this scandal, any approach that involves aiming for a midpoint, or compromise, ends up with:

"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man. You take a step towards him, he takes a step back. "Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.

Gender identity ideology is simply bad, and incredibly harmful, and needs to go into the dustbin of history.