For a decade, the transgender movement has been telling our culture a story: the story of boys and girls trapped in the wrong bodies and feeling suicidal as a result. The only answer to this, this movement has told us, is to free these trapped, invisible boys and girls with drugs, hormones, and surgical tools. Young people must go under the knife to become their true selves, and those who oppose this are pushing kids to kill themselves. It is a potent narrative.
Now, the de-transitioners are coming forward with a different story. Their story is one of adolescent confusion hastily diagnosed by medical ideologues as “gender dysphoria,” and suffering often irreversible physical, mental, and sexual damage as a result. Their testimonies of scarred chests and shattered lives are heartbreaking to hear — but despite attempts by the LGBT movement and their press propaganda arm to ignore or discredit them, their voices are getting louder. They are changing minds.
The latest to respond to these stories is famed Scottish journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil, chairman of The Spectator and host of Channel 4’s Andrew Neil Show. On July 28, he posted a video of de-transitioner Chloe Cole testifying about her experience to lawmakers:
Heartbreaking. Barbaric. Accurate words, but powerful coming from one of the U.K.’s most respected journalists. On August 1, Neil followed up with a column in the Daily Mailtitled “Why I’m proud to be a ‘TERF’ and join JK Rowling on the front line in the gender wars,” in which he detailed his change of mind on the subject:
It all started innocently enough. I watched the testimony of a 19-year-old Californian, Chloe Cole, before a committee of the U.S. Congress last Thursday.
She was giving evidence about the experience she underwent in her transition to becoming a boy and it was pretty harrowing stuff.
