I haven’t read this yet. my mental health can’t cope with it.
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My standard response to this kind of bullshit has become “How old were you when you decided to be (straight, cis, white) and how did you know?” We ask kids at 3 “are you a boy or a girl?” and get meaningful answers. Occasionally startling ones that require conversations parents are not prepared for, but no one really questions whether they (the kids) have the “right” to make that statement.
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I’m just sick of the miraculous day argument. A child is 17 and 364 days old, that last 24 hours is somehow going to transform them and their thought patterns into “an adult”?
How about individual decisions, arbitrated by people who are able to determine (people who have spent their entire lives dealing with child psychology… what an idea), for that child, whether this is a correct decision?
Oh wait, that’s what they just got rid of 
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The high court ruling will probably be overturned either at the Supreme Court or the ECHR (despite what the Brexiters want, we are not leaving that at the end of this year).
The problem now is that the TERs are trying to remove all support for young people before that happens, which will result in suicide attempts.
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Shit. No, don’t read that. Its just more “trans-trender” bullshit. No legitimate provider offer puberty blockers or hormone therapy without extensive psychological screening (in the US, anyway. I have no experience with the UK health system.) Is it perfect? Nothing human is perfect, but detransitioning here is very rare, and often a result of deciding family acceptance is more important than being true to one’s self. I can imagine (using my cloud and box analogy previously expounded upon) that a person could very easily find that their new box does not fit any better than the old one, which is why I wish we could just do away with the boxes and let people just be who they are. Unfortunately the conservative “individual liberty” politicians are completely invested in eliminating that individual liberty.
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It takes years to be seen at a GIC (some have theoretically infinite waiting lists, they don’t have enough staff to handle everyone), then it takes more years before you get blockers, then it takes more years to get hormones and then (you’ve guessed it) it takes years to get surgery (this does have a minimum age limit already). The TERs act like 8 year olds are walking into a GP’s office and getting GRS six month later.
There was one detransitioner in the support group that I was part of, we helped him detransition as the point is everyone should be who they are. There was no family pressure, he just felt that he had found out enough to know that it wasn’t right for him. I worry if that is even possible now, 20 years later, because of the TERs hatred.
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Is there anything those of us in the US can do to help?
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Wow, that is much slower than here. We have patients who can get puberty blockers within a year or so of referral, some as young as 13 or 14. GCS has an 18yo age limit, and I have never seen it before 19 or 20 just because of the pre-op psychological evaluations and mandatory counseling, but still sounds much more responsive than over the pond.
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Gendered Intelligence or Mermaids might have some ideas.
http://genderedintelligence.co.uk/
I feel like we are about to get a new Section 28 though, and I have no idea what to do. 
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Go fuck yourself, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson. Beating up on four year olds?
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Carson.
Unequivocally.
Nasty.
Transphobe.
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Tucker Swanson Burnt TV Dinner Brownie Carlson
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This is what I kept thinking, that it’s like they are selling hormones over the counter at convenience stores for kids to shoot themselves up with just to see how they feel. No one lets a kid take hormone blockers without going through a process.
But of course Gillick competence was never about 13-year-olds being competent in the same way adults are - it was about protecting children from abusive parents. But we couldn’t say that because then the kid would end up having to prove their parent was abusive in order to get their birth control.
We do a lot as a society to protect abusers. Gillick is like a deal where it was becoming hard to sustain our protections of abusers in the contemporary political climate, so a compromise had to be struck that continued to protect them but gave the people they were abusing a little more power. People who are trying to dismantle it think they can reclaim the power of abusive parents to control their kids, but I don’t really think that’s how it going to work, because the whole reason they lost that power was society no longer thought it was okay. They can’t turn back the clock (they can start a cultural civil war as a tool to implement fascism, though).
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Damn, read the comment section on that. (I know, don’t. But I did.) Sooooo much “but it is inconvenient to not deadname someone, can’t they just get over it!” bullshit. I get the struggle, I live the struggle, but damn it, it is not about your convenience! (not you, Mindysan.) It is about respect and willingness to put forth just a little effort. Should not be that much to ask. And yet…
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