Conservative MP slams transgender lobby in scathing speech

It is just fantastic to see politicians actually stand up to the transgender lobby. It gives me a bit of hope that sanity could prevail. From the Daily Mail:

An MP has shared her concerns at transgender lobby groups encouraging young girls going through puberty to consider the fact they are not ‘women’, and called for them consider their care of duty when offering the use of puberty blockers for trans children.

Conservative MP for Thurrock and former health minister, Jackie Doyle-Price, addressed the speech she made in the House of Common on International Women’s Day in March, during which she criticised the availability of transgender interventions and gender reassignment treatment for girls ‘well below the age of majority’.

Speaking on womens’ rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen’s Woman By Definition Podcast, Jackie said that far from promoting equality, the transgender movement is making things worse by trying to put a lable on children’s gender identities.  She explained: ‘It’s really regressive that we’ve almost re-adopted gender stereotyping and almost turned it into a science, to the extent that girls going growing up – and we all know going through puberty is not a pleasant time and some girls will feel very uncomfortable with their bodies.

‘And the fact this movement is encouraging them to think “Well, you might not really be a girl” in childhood, I just think is so dangerous. And we just need to give children the chance to grow up.’

Conservative MP for Thurrock and former health minister, Jackie Doyle-Price, addressed the speech she made in the House of Common on International Women’s Day in March, during which she criticised the availability of transgender interventions and gender reassignment treatment for girls ‘well below the age of majority’

Calling on other MPs to address sensitive topics more openly, she said: ‘We shouldn’t run away from risky topics, that’s what we’re elected to do. When I was health minister these issues started to cross my desk, and it’s one of these things that until it touches you, you don’t really know what’s going on.’

She continued: ‘I grew up in the 1980s where we fought against gender stereotyping, and it feels as though we’re regressing. I am particularly uncomfortable that the debate around trans rights and gender dysphoria has become pitted against the rights of women. It is surely not beyond the wit of policymakers to devise a set of rules and principles that protect the rights of transsexuals to find a way of living their lives and not discriminate against women at the same time.

‘Parliament has failed to give proper oversight of the growing number of transgender interventions for younger people. We have allowed treatments to develop at the Tavistock really unsupervised. This is no criticism of the medical professionals there, who clearly are doing their work with the best of intentions, but we need to look at the ethics of some of this and the practicalities of it.

‘We are seeing more and more girls being referred for gender reassignment treatment. We are talking about girls well below the age of majority. I personally am very uncomfortable — well, I think it is wrong — about putting forward people for treatment that is irreversible when they are not in a position legally to give consent. We really need to be more honest about the challenges of puberty.’

‘Puberty is horrible. I was a tomboy when I was growing up—that probably does not surprise hon. Members. When I got to my teens and suddenly felt my body changing, it was horrible. I hated every minute of it. I cannot believe what might have happened to me now, going through that. I carried on climbing trees and so on, and playing at being “CHiPs” rather than “Charlie’s Angels”, but now I would be on my iPad and I would suddenly find lots of other people who thought like me and then — guess what? — all those people are going to the Tavistock.

It scares the hell out of me. I fear we are doing harm to girls when actually this is something that they could just be going through. It is quite a normal thing not to be comfortable with what is happening to our bodies. The fact that so many of the girls who are going for such treatment also have issues with autism frightens me even more.

‘I was contacted by a parent just this week who thanked me for something that I had said about this issue. She wanted to talk about the experience she had had with her daughter, who is on the spectrum. As she said, one of the classic symptoms of autism is that, as a sort of self-defence tactic, you become a different personality.

‘When we think about that in the context of puberty and unhappiness with the way your body is changing, of course it is a natural response to pretend to be a different gender. I really think we have failed in this House; we have not given sufficient scrutiny and debate to a treatment which, frankly, if it is given out wrong, will do real harm to those girls and boys who go through it. I hope that this is something that we can give more attention to in future.’

‘There’s a duty of care on the LGBT lobby to think about this, screaming about this from the rooftops is not a good way to get to tolerance.’

She added: ‘We seem to have developed a culture of organisations taking advice from respected lobby groups as gospel, when actually, sitting behind that is an agenda. It means that in schools, it’s actually done with the best of intentions, but is actually potentially doing harm. ‘[The influence of lobby groups] is definitely something that the government needs to look at’.

This is exactly what Abigail Shrier laid out in her essential book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Children. Check out my interview with her below: