In this sensitively reported piece by 60 Minutes Australia, we hear the story of a 12 year old boy who wants to become a girl . . . and his mom helps in a surprising way.
Two years later? He decides that being a boy isn’t so bad after all.
“I guess I just realized that I could be happy without completely changing who I am.”
I find it a little puzzling that no one involved wants to own up to any mistakes being made. The mother seemingly feels no guilt for going along with his delusion, for letting him be prescribed dangerous puberty blockers, or for gambling with her son’s health by a non-standard use of her medication. He is unwilling to blame the psychologist(s) who said, yeah, you’re “transgender” – they gave him what he wanted at that time – or himself for emotionally manipulating his mum with threats. Mistakes? Where could those be? These decisions were “tough” but oh so well thought-through.
And yet, this experiment has a couple of physical consequences which require surgery to fix. Hopefully this young man doesn’t have any long-term consequences in his bones or fertility from the drugs or the hormones.
The reporter opines that the professionals misdiagnosed this young man as transgender. Of course, this assumes that there is such a thing, and that “being transgender” is the underlying reality that explains the unpleasant symptom of gender dysphoria.
Everyone involved seems relieved that the young man has desisted from his delusion that he is or can be a young woman. But what if he’d gone all the way, so to speak, with transition, and then had this realization, say, ten years later? It’d be a far more tragic story. Sometimes “affirming” does a lot more harm.
This was aired two years ago in Australia. One can imagine a mainstream story like this in the U.K. But in the U.S. today, the activists have captured the mainstream media so thoroughly that generally stories like this can not be told – they just don’t line up with the activists’ narrative. To the credit of this show, they allow a responsible doctor, Prof. Whitehall, to speak. He alone sees the mistakes here.
