- Around the world there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to gender clinics. Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a 'gender affirmative' approach - fully supporting their children's change of identity. But is this approach right?
- Transgender Kids: Who knows best? by John Conroy was first broadcast on BBC2 in January 2017.
Mr Conroy interviewed a number of young adults and parents of children with gender confusion. One young woman regretted taking testosterone and having had a double mastectomy. The father of another young woman described his fights with his daughter who decided, after about 3 years of confusion, that she was finally happy with her body and was glad that her father had dissuaded her from doing anything irreversible. The mother of much younger boy was happy to take her child to see Dr Zucker for support. The documentary centred on Dr Kenneth Zucker, a renowned child psychologist in Toronto, who was sacked from his job in 2015 for questioning the "gender affirmative approach" which has swept through the psychiatry profession without, he says, sufficient attention to the particular history and circumstances of individual patients.
It is worth bearing in mind that "good parenting" includes challenging a child's mistaken beliefs in a sympathetic and supportive way. It is possible that failure to do so could lead a young adult to accuse parents and medical professionals in years to come of child abuse for failure to protect him/her from an obviously harmful behaviour. The future will judge us.
Please visit the UK website https://www.transgendertrend.com/ for parents who question the trans narrative.
The number of children who really do have gender dysphoria is minute (less than 1 in 30,000 approx). It is important not to lay the seeds of confusion in the minds of the vast majority of children who go through adolescence with normal questioning "Who am I?" They are not all transgender.
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