A complex addition to the transgender debate
Last night on television Anita Singh
‘Wherever I look these days, somebody somewhere is talking about trans issues,” said psychotherapist and author Stella O’malley at the start of Trans Kids: It’s
Time to Talk (Channel 4). It certainly feels that way. The figures are astonishing: in the last nine years, the number of children referred to the NHS’S gender service has gone up by 2,500 per cent.
O’malley set out to examine whether allowing young people to change gender is doing them harm. She does not come from a position of neutrality. As a child growing up in Eighties Dublin, O’malley was convinced that she was a boy, trapped in a girl’s body. Yet now, aged 43, she is a mother-of-two (married to a man) and entirely happy with being a woman. In other words: it was just a phase.
She is worried that impressionable teenagers “are being sold a pup”, rushing headlong into the transitioning process without understanding the implications. “I’m haunted by the thought there are kids out there like I was – kids that change their minds,” O’malley said. “If I had been a child today I’m absolutely certain that I would have transitioned. And where would that have left me?”
O’malley’s own complex history fuelled the film. Her argument was based on her experience: she grew out of wanting a sex change, ergo other children may do the same – a view likely to infuriate trans activists. Nevertheless, she approached the subject with compassion. Her interviewees included Cole, a vlogger who cheerfully affirmed he was “OK with being a guinea pig” for treatment; and Debbie, who married as a man and waited until middle age to transition
– a decision that had clearly taken a toll on her wife and children. Delaying the process brings different problems.
We also saw the parents of Matt, an autistic 13-year-old who was born a girl and diagnosed with gender dysphoria. For two years, he has been taking blockers to delay the onset of puberty. If he continues on this path he will be prescribed testosterone, the long-term effects of which are unknown. His mother was anguished: “Are we doing the right thing? Is Matt going to turn around when he’s 23 and say, ‘I was a child. Why did you do that to me?’”
According to the programmemakers, trans groups were approached to take part but all declined. Instead, they were shown trying to storm a meeting of radical feminists. “What we can hear outside is the narcissistic rage of millennials,” thundered one of the speakers, who did not come out of it well either.
By the end, O’malley was weeping over her belief that many children are being “led” down a path from which they can never turn back.
Horizon’s (BBC Two) investigation into the contraceptive pill was balanced, well-researched and backed by statistics. Unfortunately, that didn’t make for thrilling television – more like a leaflet from the GP’S surgery spun into an hour of BBC prime time.
The premise was fine: the Pill, first introduced in 1961, is Britain’s most popular form of birth control. Three million of us currently take it, but how many understand how these synthetic hormones really work, and are there real risks involved? Dr Zoe Williams, a GP and regular on the BBC’S Trust Me,
I’m a Doctor series, took us through the side effects one by one.
Findings were simply explained and largely reassuring: your chance of getting breast cancer if taking the Pill is slightly increased, but the chance of getting some other cancers is lowered. Scare stories about the risk of deadly blood clots were debunked, and we were reminded about the serious effect such stories can have; in 1995, when experts claimed that women should stop taking several brands of the Pill due to thrombosis fears, it reportedly led to 13,600 additional abortions in the following year and a 25 per cent increase in births.
There were plenty more statistics where these came from, and here lay the problem. Visually, this was very dull. A diagram of a woman’s reproductive organs was straight out of a school biology lesson.
The most interesting section concerned the link between the Pill and depression, particularly in teenage girls. A study in Denmark claimed that Pill users aged 15-19 were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide than non-users. No such data is available from the NHS, but a quarter of the British women surveyed for the programme said taking the Pill had negatively affected their mental health. An hour devoted to that one topic would have made a more interesting piece of television.