IN A welcome move, the Government has announced that this summer it will set out details of its plans to ban under-18s from having sex-change surgery.
Equalities minister Liz Truss said that the development was about ensuring that under-18s were protected from decisions that would be irreversible in the future. She said: ‘I believe strongly that adults should have the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit, but I think it’s very important that while people are still developing their decision-making capabilities we protect them from making those irreversible decisions.’
Predictably, Ms Truss was criticised by the ‘trans’ lobby, with Mermaids, a charity which ‘supports transgender children’, commenting: ‘We believe that transgender young people should have the same right to make important personal decisions as non-trans people. It would be an extraordinary move for the minister for women and equalities to support the introduction of a new form of inequality into British medical practice, by effectively treating transgender teenagers as less capable than their cisgender peers.’
However, being male or female is not a disease, nor is it ‘just one colour in the rainbow of sexuality’; it does not require medical treatment, especially surgical removal of perfectly healthy reproductive organs and prescribing opposite-sex hormones for life. It is significant that advocates of under-age autonomy do not support the idea of young people having a say in parental break-up, which arguably is far more detrimental to their health than being a boy or a girl. The fact that ‘trans’ campaigners would allow children to rush into irreversible life-changing medical interventions suggests they fear an even more dangerous change – a change of mind – which is likely to happen if they are allowed to go through puberty in the normal way.
The Government should be commended for taking this first step back to sanity, but it must also be asked why it is continuing with its new sex education programme, which includes teaching about ‘trans’ issues and telling young children that they might have been ‘born into the wrong body’. Many who have objected to ‘trans’ indoctrination argue that children who feel they may have been ‘born into the wrong body’ are actually gay and that they should be allowed to express it. But why encourage them to embrace any harmful and self-harming lifestyle before they are old enough to assess the pros and cons for themselves? Children are not allowed to give their consent to being sterilised, which is exactly the outcome from ‘trans treatment’. The ‘let them do what they want’ approach does not extend to allowing them to veto parental break-up, but neither does it apply to smoking ‘if they want to’ – for health reasons, naturally.
