Top psychologist: Half my young patients say they are transgender

A LEADING clinical psychologist with 16 years’ experience in child mental health says more than half of her patients now identify as transgender.

The expert, who wants to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, saw a sudden rise in the number of youngsters claiming to be ‘trans’ after the coronavirus lockdowns.

She is currently seeing a dozen families and has helped almost 40 over the past year but has never before encountered so many young patients identifying as trans.

In many cases, she said, youngsters now coming to see her with mental anguish or suicidal thoughts had been allowed to transition from one gender to another at a young age, sometimes even at five or six.

She said parents rarely associated the psychological problems that were blighting their children’s lives with their change of gender.

‘The parent would be telling me about their teenager, about their mental anguish, suicidal thoughts and self harm, and then they’d drop something in, so casually that I’d almost think I’d missed it, “Oh, and he’s a transboy (or girl), transitioned when he (or she) was five (or six or seven), but that’s all fine”,’ she wrote in an online article.

The medical expert, who is based in southern England, said she feared being accused of ‘transphobia’ or even conversion therapy if she questioned or explored the child’s decision to swap gender.

The clinician warned that parents had been ‘sold a lie’ that allowing their children to live at a young age as the opposite gender to their birth sex was not a psychological risk.

She said the ‘trans’ lobby has convinced people not to worry about children ‘socially transitioning’ because it was reversible but, she argued, this is wrong as children whose gender change was affirmed by the adults around them commonly find themselves in an ‘impossible situation’ when they reach puberty.

‘Social transition isn’t reversible because what we tell our children for years can’t be reversed,’ she wrote. ‘When we disconnect them from their biological sex we set up patterns of denial and secrets. We set them up to hate their bodies at puberty, to beg for [puberty] blockers and binders, because for years we told them they could change sex and they believed us – but their body knows otherwise.

‘They become desperate to go back to the years when no one knew any different, but that time will never come again. Time is not reversible. What we grow up being told in our childhood matters for our whole lives.’

Last month The Mail on Sunday revealed how one in every 15 pupils at a leading secondary school identifies as transgender or non-binary. More than 60 youngsters at the school which has about 1,000 students on its roll have declared their gender to be different from their birth sex or do not identify as either male or female.

The majority have done so since most Covid-19 lockdown restrictions were lifted last summer, raising concern about the impact of online trans ‘influencers’ on youngsters who were largely confined to their homes for months.

‘We are setting children up to hate their bodies’