Micheál Martin
The Taoiseach Micheál Martin was asked a simple question this week by reporter Ben Scallon: “Do you believe that a child can be transgender?” He answered definitively, with the confidence of a man who knew the party line: “Yes, I do believe.”
He then went on to pontificate: “There are young people in life who’ve had very significantly difficult issues as they journey through life and many have identified as trans and that is the situation. I don’t believe we should get into culture wars like they have in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. I think we should be mature and deal with this properly and always keep the individual at the centre of our considerations and not to be engaged in undermining people’s dignity or people’s individuality.”
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. This is a harrowing medical scandal, and dismissing whistleblowers’ concerns as “culture wars” is a flippancy the Taoiseach will come to regret.
Just when countries across the western world are waking up to the fact that there is no evidence to support medical interventions on children and vulnerable adults, Ireland, led by our hapless leader, decides to march in exactly the opposite direction.
He’ll regret it one day, though. Right now Micheál Martin is relying on a chain of trust that he will eventually discover is weak. This chain of trust has supported the entire transgender phenomenon for some years now. Politicians presume that lobby groups such as Belong To and TENI are providing reliable data. They assume that medical transition is supported by a robust, quality evidence-base. But it isn’t.
There is no robust, quality evidence-base to support medical transition for people with gender dysphoria, just as there is no robust evidence base supporting lobotomy as a treatment for psychiatric disorders. These interventions are a clear example of hope triumphing over experience. The long-term outcomes are dreadful. Although many people who had lobotomies proclaimed themselves happy with the intervention, objective, standardised measurements paint a devastating picture.
Micheál Martin doesn’t know any of this yet. But following the gaffe he made with Ben Scallon this week, he will likely be informed soon. As the Taoiseach is being led by the likes of Mary Butler T.D., who oversaw the medical transition of her child, he will be advised by Butler and other trans activists that people who identify as trans are suffering like no one else on earth. The only reason adults can argue for such radical medical interventions, which lead to infertility, impaired sexual functioning, anorgasmia, osteoporosis, heart complications, early-onset dementia, and many other health complications, is that the children are in such fevered pain that there is no other option.
As a psychotherapist, I can tell you there are always ways to learn to cope with mental distress. I meet clients every day who suffer tremendous distress. With psychological support, they can learn distress tolerance, coping methods, and how to self-soothe. Psychological solutions for psychological issues are a well-established field. Physical interventions for psychological issues are a risky endeavour, as once the body is altered, the mental pain often moves on to another issue. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that people who medically transition are more than nineteen times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. This is a vulnerable cohort, and they need appropriate care and support, not extreme body modification.
The parents who approved the medical transition of their children are, understandably, the most invested in this issue. I feel for them, they didn’t know any better. They felt out of their depth when their child announced they were “trans”, so they brought them to the doctor. This is where it all goes awry, as reckless clinicians gave these immature and distressed children puberty blockers that were never designed for gender dysphoria (they were developed for a condition known as precocious puberty).
These parents will never back down, as they simply cannot contemplate that they may have inadvertently harmed their child. A father I know injects his child with her hormones because she has a phobia of needles. He will never be able to confront what he has done.
Puberty blockers completely stop the child’s sexual development, and so the child is no longer in sync with their friends. While their peers are having crushes and imagining future relationships, the puberty-blocked child remains childlike, with no interest in acquiring a mate. They exist in limbo, suppressed into a childlike state, never falling in love or developing romantic interest. Love songs or romantic stories hold no appeal, as their reproductive functioning is never awakened, and so they never experience the desire to pair bond.
Then, typically at 18, the child is prescribed cross-sex hormones and enters a chemical adulthood, without ever awakening their reproductive system, the specific capacity that differentiates the child from the adult.
I’ve been immersed in this field for nearly ten years, and I’m well aware that teenagers who identify as transgender are typically in deep distress when they go online to find solutions to their pain. There they discover the idea that perhaps they could really be a boy, or a girl, or non-binary. It’s a mesmerising idea, that all your problems stem from being “born in the wrong body.” From there, the child becomes obsessed with the bewitching idea of transformation.
But nobody is born in the wrong body. We are born in our bodies and as our bodies, and we die when our bodies die.
There is no such thing as a “transgender child.” There are children in distress, children who are gender nonconforming, and children searching for explanations. But childhood is a period of development and exploration, not consolidation. A child’s identity is fluid, provisional, and shaped by context, not something to be medicalised or concretised.
There are two main types of children who experience what is now known as gender dysphoria: childhood-onset and adolescent-onset. Children with childhood-onset gender dysphoria are gender nonconforming from a very young age, think of a little boy of two or three running around in a princess dress and his mother’s high heels. These children typically grow up to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual, so long as their sexual development is not impeded by puberty blockers.
Adolescent-onset gender dysphoria is different. Teens who identify as transgender are disproportionately likely to have other challenges such as autism, ADHD, eating disorders, and anxiety. They are often lost and lonely, and struggle to manage their sexual development. It is typically after a trauma, and following extended time online, that they come to identify as transgender.
None of these children should be described as “transgender.” These are gender nonconforming children who do not need to be placed on a pathway of lifetime medicalisation. They should be free to experiment as they wish, without irreversible intervention.
That does not mean anyone needs to be forced to use a different name or pronouns. Experimentation is a necessary and healthy part of childhood and adolescence. It should be free and easy, and it should never involve legal changes or irreversible medical interventions.
It is the adult’s job not to foreclose the child’s right to an open future by ensuring those in our care are not locked into premature decisions. It is our job to hold space for children and adolescents. They might want to charge onwards, fast and furious. Responsible adults do not let them.