Puberty blockers and transkids - another perspective

I’ve been thinking about the debate around puberty blockers and trans kids. It’s emotive, it’s weighted, and it’s genuinely difficult.

I want to push back on the idea that children don’t understand their own bodies — that they lack the capacity to recognise when something feels deeply wrong. If a child tells a parent or carer that something doesn’t feel right, our first instinct should be to listen, not to assume they are only capable of surface-level thinking.

I knew something was wrong — misaligned — when I was six years old. I had no words for it, no role models, no concept of what transgender even meant. In karate class and out walking the dog, I was often mistaken for a boy, and I never corrected anyone. In my imagination, in my own inner world, I was a boy. I convinced myself that puberty would sort things out — that I’d finally feel like a girl, or that someone would notice something needed to be done, or that biology would simply resolve it. It didn’t.

When I hear debates about puberty blockers being harmful to children, Mrs Lovejoy from The Simpsons keeps drifting into my head: “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” I understand the impulse. But I want to say two things.

The first is that feelings are data. The word “feeling” is used to dismiss gender dysphoria, but if a child says they feel unwell, do you tell them they can’t have a headache because they’re only feeling it? Gender dysphoria is real. It is painful — physically, mentally, and I would argue spiritually, though that’s a conversation for another day.

The second is this: trans kids have been medicated for a long time. Just medicated wrong.

I’m in my late forties now. At seventeen, I was given a diagnosis of mental illness and put on medication. I’ve been on it for nearly thirty years. Whether or not it was a misdiagnosis is almost beside the point. What matters is what that medication has done to my body. My kidneys are functioning at around 50%. It significantly affected my fertility. My thyroid has more or less given up. That is a great deal more damage than puberty blockers cause.

We are so frightened of sex, sexuality, and gender that we find it preferable to put children on psychiatric medication rather than take seriously what they are telling us. We dismiss them as having been “groomed,” simply because the person they admire happens to be living authentically. We gaslight them into doubting their own experience of their own bodies. And there is a thick seam of misogyny running through all of it. It is trans boys — those we insist on seeing as girls — who are most readily dismissed as confused and gullible. Trans girls, meanwhile, are labelled dramatic and attention-seeking.

There are plenty of voices willing to say that transitioning as an adult — when you “really know your own mind” — is acceptable, while remaining entirely blind to the damage done in the decades before that: the sustained weight of dysphoria, and the relentless mental toll of spending a lifetime feeling fundamentally out of alignment with yourself. I am exhausted by the misogyny pouring from the mouths of people who call themselves feminists.

I genuinely don’t know what the answer is with puberty blockers. But I do know that the side effects being cited are just as present for cisgender kids who use them. This is not a long-term treatment for anyone. It is not chemical castration.

If you fit (however uncomfortably) in what society calls normal, the chances are you have never had to question your own reality — not in the deepest sense. I don’t mean working out who you are; we all do that. I mean the grinding experience of your inner sense of self being at odds with the world’s consensus about who you are. Of spending your life trying to squeeze yourself into a shape that simply doesn’t fit. That squeeze — sustained, relentless, year after year — breaks you.

There really aren’t that many trans people. And yet everywhere I look there is a comment piece, a petition, a news report, an AI-generated smear — an enormous amount of energy directed at a very small number of people. That is not a culture war. It is a campaign of eradication.

Growing up, getting married, having children — these are not the only things a life can be. We need to recover the idea of community: one that holds different kinds of people, equal in worth, each bringing different gifts and perspectives. We have sorted ourselves into boxes so small and so rigid that we have lost the ability to see the gift of the other.