Activists are playing a significant role in the rise of gender confusion among young people, critics have warned.
This is fuelling concerns that young people in the UK will grow up having had medical transitions that they did not really want.
This comes as Dorothy Stringer School, in Brighton, has had 40 pupils between the ages of eleven and 16 who do not identify with their biological sex. A further 36 pupils identify as ‘gender-fluid’.
Life-changing
Over the past five years, the number of children referred to the NHS’s gender clinic has risen by 700 per cent.
At the age of 16 or 18, it is feared that many of those referred will have life-changing alterations made to their bodies, and be given hormones that will affect their fertility, without proper medical diagnosis.
Michele Moore from the Patient Safety Academy at Oxford University said: “In no other field with such effects has treatment got so far ahead of research”.
‘Just do it’
Parents fear that the prevalence of radical gender ideology is sowing seeds of gender confusion.
One mother found her daughter visiting websites where strangers were telling her what to say to get doctors to prescribe her hormones.
YouTube activists urge young listeners to “just do it”, with very little mention of the damaging consequences.
Writing for The Sunday Times, Andrew Gilligan said: “In thousands of Instagram posts, Tumblr messages and YouTube ‘vlogs’, impressionable young people, largely girls, are told by upbeat, pretty folk slightly older than themselves how transitioning can be an escape route from uncertainty, autism, friendlessness, abuse, the pains of puberty, or homosexuality.”
Social services
In Brighton, LGBT charity Allsorts Youth Project asserts that parents who question their child’s wish to transition could be referred to social services.
The group has been highly active at Dorothy Stringer School, which now has 76 gender-confused students.
Another trans group, Gires, claims that gender treatments will mitigate the symptoms of Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), saying “young people who have been successfully treated, are often described as having no residual ASD.
“The symptoms have disappeared once the dysphoria has been treated”, they argue, but added that this is “not always the case”.
Shot down
One Brighton teacher said: “What’s happening is worrying and many of us know it, but nobody wants to speak up and get shot.”
What’s happening is worrying and many of know it, but nobody wants to speak up and get shot.
Jane Galloway, parent and women’s rights campaigner, concludes: “I fear greatly that in 10 to 15 years’ time, we will find ourselves with a slew of young adults with mutilated bodies, no sexual function, who will turn round to the NHS and ask, ‘Why did you let us do this?’”