No Such Thing As a “Trans Child”

They’re Not Even Claiming that “Gender-Affirming Care” Is Effective for Adolescents Anymore

December 30, 2024

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of assertions in TERFdom to the effect that there is no such thing as a “transgender child.”

On December 28, J.K. Rowling posted on X in response to a critic, “There are no trans kids. No child is 'born in the wrong body'. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.”

This is, of course, completely true.

Building on that, UK commentator Andrew Doyle published a piece on his Substack earlier today titled, “There are no trans kids; Children should not be sacrificed on the altar of ideology.” In it, he argued:

The concept of the ‘trans child’ has become an essential tool in gender activism. In order to justify reorganising society according to ‘gender identity’ rather than sex - and thereby admitting men who identify as women into female-only spaces - it must first be determined that the concept of a ‘gender identity’ is real. And if there is such a thing as a sexed soul that is misaligned with our body, it must surely be present from the moment of conception. As such, being ‘trans’ is not a decision one makes in adult life, but an innate quality that exists at all ages.

This is true as well. Proponents of “gender identity” need for the concept of a “trans child” to be real in order to justify: (1) the invasion of men into female-only spaces on the basis of their “gender identities”; and (2) the wholesale abolition of the material reality of sex throughout law, policy, and practice.

This is logical. In order to justify the enshrinement of “gender identity” in the law, its proponents need for it to be real; if it’s real, it’s also innate; if it’s innate, kids must have it. Ergo, there are “trans kids.”

Furthermore, according to the logic, if there are “trans kids,” there must be medical interventions to help them become their “authentic selves.”

For a while, proponents of “gender identity” were saying that some kids were “born in the wrong body,” and needed “treatment” to help them obtain the right one. When it became obvious that no one changes sex, the proponents of “gender identity” shifted the goal posts a bit (as they always do) to say that so-called “gender-affirming care” (hormones and surgery) is “effective” at helping these children psychologically—even if such children could not change sex, at least changing their bodies would help them feel more like the opposite sex.

Now all of that is out the window, and today’s “experts” want to give kids puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and surgeries, just because. Read more to find out why.

Paid-only content follows. If you are not already a paid subscriber and would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider becoming one today.