How have we let our children end up in this gender crisis?

A couple of months ago, a Telegraph reader wrote to me, asking: “Where have all the grown-ups gone?” As doctors, teachers, medical professionals, the police and parents abdicate their responsibilities en masse, it’s a question more and more of us are asking. And usually it’s accompanied by a dry laugh: “What are you going to do?”

But nobody was laughing on Sunday, when a whistleblower at a school where 17 children are transitioning revealed to a national newspaper that many of the students were being “tricked” into changing their gender because they’re autistic. And something will have to be done, before a generation of children are left psychologically and physically scarred.

That the number – 17 – isn’t the most shocking part of Sunday’s exposé says a lot. However, it is far from saying it all. Because whatever the anonymous whistleblower – a teacher of more than 20 years’ experience – claims to have witnessed, the true scale of this scandal is only just beginning to emerge.

Convinced that “autistic children who are not transgender are being exploited by the transgender lobby” and “brainwashed into believing that they are”, the teacher detailed how nine of the children she had seen identify as transgender in the school had been officially diagnosed with autism, while the rest had shown definite signs of the condition. Because they had “complex mental health issues”, she explained, these children were all the more inclined “to be a part of a group of like-minded people”. One autistic teenager, born a girl, was already planning to have a double mastectomy. Others, she believes, were taking “puberty-blocking” drugs (which interrupt physical development in order to make the transitioning process easier when they reach the age of 18), unbeknown to their parents. And on more than one occasion, she saw older pupils “grooming” younger ones into claiming they, too, were transgender, prompting “copycat” cases.

This teacher echoes the belief of all fair-minded people when she says that: “If a child genuinely has gender dysphoria, then, of course, they should

Something will have to be be done, before an entire generation of children is scarred

get all the love and support they need.”

Being trapped in the wrong body must be a special kind of hell, and once you’re old enough to make important decisions surrounding gender and sex reassignment, that should be your prerogative. Anyone who has read up on what this involves understands it’s not something people take lightly.

But we’re talking about children here, and children go through fads, they change their minds and they copy others: it’s what they do. Adults, on the other hand, are supposed to identify and rise above these developmental

stepping stones without dismissing them entirely – because it’s possible they may turn into something more permanent.

This exposé comes at a time when shocking revelations about the irresponsible, knee-jerk reactions to any hint of gender dysphoria in children are being made at an alarming rate – whether it’s the Girl Guides refusing to tell girls or parents if a girl or leader in their unit used to identify as male, the Tavistock Clinic – Britain’s only NHS gender identity service for children – being accused of fasttracking young people into lifechanging decisions without assessing their personal histories, or schools being advised not to tell parents if their children want to change sex.

Meanwhile, the Government is consulting on whether to allow people to change gender without medical diagnoses. And none of it is about love or support, but fear: a fear so potent it’s driving otherwise sane and educated adults to betray a generation of vulnerable children. Dr Kate Godfreyfaussett, a psychologist who works with children in schools across London, goes so far as to call it “state-sanctioned child abuse”.

When I ask whether it can really be true that children could be sent off to consult with gender clinics without the parents’ knowledge, she explains that, currently, “the confidentiality of a trans child actually trumps everything, including a parent’s right to know. And if a school believes a child is mature enough to understand the implications of what they’re doing, they don’t need parental consent.” Added to this, “if a child comes to school and tells the teachers ‘my parents are anti-trans’, the school can call in social services and treat it as a safeguarding concern under emotional abuse. Theoretically, the child could even be taken away.”

In 10 years, I believe we’ll look back and ask: how did we let this happen? How did we foist our own complex adult neuroses on children? How were we so blinded by PC ideologies? But before that, we’re all likely to ask ourselves and each other many more times: “Where have all the grown-ups gone?”