Top author’s fears over ops for transgender children
Wait until they’re mature, says Tracy Beaker bestseller
She made a name for herself writing books for youngsters that tackle issues as broad as child neglect, divorce and mental illness.
Now Dame Jacqueline Wilson has decided to weigh in on one of the most controversial debates of the day.
The 73-year- old said she feels ‘very, very worried’ for children who are about to undergo gender reassignment surgery. She believes they should not be allowed to go through hormone therapy until they are ‘utterly mature’.
She said: ‘ Some people, right from the time that they are toddlers, are aware that something is wrong and they wish that they could be the other sex.
‘But I’m also aware that some children feel strongly for a while and then they change their minds.’ She added: ‘I think it’s a decision that has to be left a while until you are... certain you know all the actual consequences.
‘Where I would be very, very worried is young children taking any kind of drug, hormones or whatever, the long-term effects of which we don’t know.’
Dame Jacqueline said, for young children, it’s not ‘a question of just having your bits lopped off’, it is a ‘serious, difficult surgery’ which can have ‘devastating consequences’.
She said that in an ideal world gender reassingment surgery would not even be necessary and that everyone would be able to ‘act exactly the way they want to but not try to change themselves physically’.
But she said that society still has a strange way of ‘putting girls and boys into different slots’.
She told the Telegraph: ‘I wish we could come to a stage when anybody who fancied could wear a dress and do so- called “girlie” things or anyone who wanted to could wear jeans and tinker with car engines.’ The author said she would only include a trans character in one of her books if there was a ‘really strong reason’. Otherwise she would just be ‘jumping on the bandwagon’.
Dame Jacqueline’s most famous work is the Tracy Beaker books – which were made into a successful BBC series with Dani harmer as Tracy. They told the story of a young girl navigating adolescence in a care home. however, she said that, in 2019, she can no longer create teenage characters.
She said: ‘It gets harder the older they get, because social media has changed things. This whole intensity about the way you look and what people think of you. I find it quite difficult to put myself in the mind of an average 13-year-old nowadays.’
Five specialist clinicians recently resigned from Britain’s only NhS gender clinic for children after it was accused of risking an ‘unregulated live experiment’ on vulnerable youngsters. But the Gender Identity Development Service clinic, run by the Tavistock and Portman NhS Foundation Trust, said it offered a safe service and an independent review had not identified ‘immediate issues in relation to patient safety or failings’.