It’s another giant leap for trans-kind
ADoLESCENT boys who think they are girls are having their sperm frozen by the NHS before they undergo gender reassignment treatment so they can father children after they change sex.
Run that by me again. There goes another paragraph I never thought I’d write.
Hang on, though, there’s more. The health service is also storing the eggs of teenage girls who are taking male hormones so they can give birth after they become men.
These ‘services’ are being offered to boys as young as 12 and girls aged 16 and over.
Leave aside for a moment perfectly legitimate arguments about whether sex- change procedures should even be available to children whose bodies haven’t yet fully developed. This is madness. Can you imagine the NHS committee meeting that came up with the idea? ‘oK, thanks everyone. Just to sum up: We’re closing hundreds of wards, we’re short of thousands of doctors and nurses, waiting lists for routine operations are longer than ever and we’ve got a winter flu crisis looming. Is there any other business before we adjourn to the pub?’
‘Just a thought, chair, but isn’t it about time we started offering fertility treatment to transgender teenagers.’
‘Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that before?’
What baffles me is why any young man going to great lengths to change sex would want to be a father. or why a woman who is having surgery to become male wishes to give birth. Surely, if the operation is a success, that would become a biological impossibility. Men can’t have babies. Full stop.
Not that you’re supposed to state the bleedin’ obvious any more. In the increasingly deranged view of the militant ‘trans’ lobby, anyone saying that men can’t give birth is guilty of a ‘hate crime’.
To adapt what Humpty Dumpty said about words in Alice Through The Looking Glass, gender means whatever they choose it to mean.
In the looking-glass world of gender fluidity, it’s all gone Humpty Dumpty. From gender-neutral toilets to freezing the sperm of 12-year-old boys about to become girls is a small step for trans-kind.
So many of their arguments fly in the face of nature. Transzealots reserve their bitterest hatred for feminists like Germaine Greer who refuse to accept, with every justification, that a male person in possession of a full set of wedding tackle should be allowed to describe himself as a woman and use female toilets and changing rooms.
The Left-wing lesbian activist Linda Bellos is the latest to incur their wrath. In yet another outrageous assault on free speech, she’s just been banned from speaking at Cambridge University for fear of a ‘trans’ backlash.
This column has always accepted that there is a minuscule number of people who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria — the feeling that they were born into the wrong sex. They deserve compassion and understanding and sympathetic treatment by the NHS.
BUT that doesn’t mean that public organisations such as universities and the health service should automatically capitulate to the more extreme demands of this gobby, intolerant minority.
Professor Gary Butler, head clinician for Britain’s only NHS service for young people with gender dysphoria, justifies freezing sperm and eggs on the grounds that: ‘Transgender people are not making a lifestyle choice. They are following their biological and psychological make- up about their identity. If they want to become parents and raise a family, the science and medicine is there. It’s the right of the individual to be able to do that.’
Actually, no it’s not. It might be a demand, a desire, a need or an aspiration, but it isn’t a ‘right’.
Just because the science and medicine is available, it doesn’t mean it must be provided free of charge. We might have the technology, but we don’t have to use it.
Sadly, what we’re seeing here is just another insane manifestation of the suffocating nanny statism which has infantilised a generation of young people into believing that they have an inalienable ‘right’ to anything they want, gratis.
Never mind the thorny ethical question of whether the NHS should be freezing the sperm of confused schoolboys well below the legal age of sexual consent. What about the cost?
You don’t have to be a raging ‘ transphobe’ to question the sanity of this scheme. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, former chairman of the ethics committee of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said: ‘The NHS is about treating people who are ill — that’s what we pay our taxes for. It is not to aid people’s various wishes about what they want to do with their bodies or their futures. With increasing pressure on the NHS and so many essential services not being delivered, where are these funds for fertility treatment coming from?’
Precisely. None of this comes cheap. Egg-freezing costs £4,000 for one cycle and around £300 a year for storage. The price of preserving sperm is around £400, plus £300 a year to keep it frozen.
The current cost of providing this ‘service’ is believed to run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. But with more young people being encouraged by proselytising trans campaigners to question their gender, the sky’s the limit.
We keep being told that the NHS is in permanent financial crisis. Why should taxpayers have to foot the bill for crackpot transgender fertility treatments when some patients face an interminable wait for operations to alleviate painful, commonplace conditions, such as cataracts and hip replacements?
No one has the right to expect the state to pay for men who become women to father children — or for women who become men to give birth. And, no, I still can’t believe I’ve just written that paragraph, either.