Against the weaponisation of youthful suffering
An article by a child psychiatrist on the abuse of “suicide risk” in promoting medical intervention for children who identify as trans was recently published in The Critic.
The author wrote:
When a child identifies as trans, the spectre of suicide is frequently raised by campaigners — sometimes in a highly manipulative and unethical form. Parents are told that unless they immediately “socially transition” their child — i.e., refer to them as members of the opposite sex, and present them as such to everyone else — their child is highly likely to self-harm.
Perhaps the most egregious form this claim takes is that unless a child is swiftly medicalised, first with puberty-blockers and then cross-sex hormones to cause their body to develop towards the “right” sex, the risk of suicide is hugely elevated. This emotional blackmail is expressed in the activist catchphrase, “Better a live daughter than a dead son”. Susie Green, former chief executive of the trans lobby group Mermaids, has described medicalisation of gender-distressed young people as “literally lifesaving”.
The idea that suicide is practically inevitable in this group instills such fear that people around them often take immediate action to try to mitigate this risk. Caution about the unintended impacts on the gender-distressed person themselves — and on those around them — are frequently overlooked.
Read the rest of the article here: