Gender change as a false solution to psychological problems

When children and young people feel unwell during puberty, the solution in more and more cases is sex reassignment. However, the problem for many young people is not that they were born in the wrong body – but that they have psychological problems. This was the case, for example, with 17-year-old Katherine from Scotland, as the Sunday Post reported: In May, Katherine recounted during a private event in Holyrood, a district of Edinburgh, how her teachers and social workers had indoctrinated her into believing that she was born in the wrong body.

Katherine didn’t know what “transgender” meant until she was 10 or 11, she told childcare experts and politicians in the Scottish Parliament: At that age, the topic was covered in school lessons – around fifth grade. And then Katherine’s puberty began: “I was in care and social workers told me that my discomfort with my developing body was because I was born in the wrong body – that I was a boy, not a girl,” Katherine says (translated from English). The real reason for Katherine’s discomfort was that she was abused as a child.

But according to Katherine, the social workers did not address the abuse Katherine experienced. Instead, they ordered tight breast bandages for Katherine and told her that she would be happy with her body with hormone pills and after a sex change. “They never said a word about the life-threatening side effects of taking strong medication or the horrific physical effects of a radical operation that would change me forever.” Her carers made such a sex change seem so simple that, looking back, it is no wonder Katherine believed them.

Katherine was not the only one. In Great Britain, the number of gender-specific therapies has increased significantly: in 2009, only 51 people began such therapy through the responsible “UK NHS Gender Identity Service”, by 2014 there were already 590 and in 2016 almost 1,800. One reason for this rapid – even exponential – increase: so-called puberty blockers came onto the market. These are drugs that use hormones to delay puberty. However, according to British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, there are still no positive, measurable results from these drugs.

Nevertheless, from 2014 onwards, puberty blockers were no longer used solely for research purposes – but were adopted into routine practice and administered to a wider group of patients, Cass writes in a report. “Introducing a treatment with uncertain benefits without further testing represents a significant departure from established practice.” Cass therefore conducted a study to investigate how much evidence there is for treating children and adolescents with “puberty blockers”. She concluded that the evidence for such gender-affirming drugs is “remarkably weak”. “For most young people, the medical route is not the best way to address gender-specific issues,” the report says.

For Katherine, too, such a medical path was not the right one to address her “gender-specific problems”. Because she did not have any gender-specific problems: she was not born in the wrong body. Katherine realised this when she left care and returned to her mother, she says. Her mother gave Katherine time and space to find out who she was – without the pressure of being transgender. This saved Katherine from making a “terrible mistake”, says the 17-year-old: she realised that a gender change is irreversible and painful.

Katherine is not the only one to have had such experiences: At the same event, a mother reported how she sought help from a Scottish mental health service because her autistic daughter was cutting herself. But the mother was not helped to protect her daughter. Instead, an employee of this service reported her for alleged child abuse: because she did not want to identify her child as a boy. “My daughter was told that she could change her gender and change socially and that she did not need to tell us. She was told that the school did not need to tell us,” the mother said, according to Sunday Post.

Katherine is glad she changed her mind at the last minute. But she is worried about other children like her who don’t fit in and are an “easy target” for gender ideology: “I hope that politicians will do something to remove this harmful ideology from schools, because far too many very vulnerable children like me are being pressured to believe the lies they are being told.”

The criticism is having an effect – at least in Great Britain

The National Health Service in England has already stopped the use of puberty blockers, as the Mirror reported. The reason: There is too little data on the long-term benefit-risk ratio. The Scottish gender clinic “NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde” has also stopped prescribing puberty blockers to minors. The clinic would also no longer offer other hormone treatments for children and adolescents, according to an official statement.

Germany, on the other hand, is sticking to puberty blockers – even though the federal government advises against them on its website. And that’s not all: in Germany, around 2,600 people underwent a “genital organ reassignment operation” in 2021, according to figures from the Federal Statistical Office. That’s almost 2,000 operations more than ten years ago. That in turn represents an increase of more than 275 percent. A good third of these sex reassignments occur among 15- to 25-year-olds. That is, the age group in which the child’s body is forming into an adult body – which can trigger insecurity in many young people. But it does not necessarily mean that a person was born in the wrong body, as recent studies from the University of Groningen show: According to them, it is not unusual for pubescent teenagers to be dissatisfied with their own gender and identity. But after puberty, most people cope very well with their gender.

In the report on her study, Cass recommends that gender-specific services should assess cases holistically. This is standard practice for other health services for children and young people in the UK: According to Cass, this includes screening for neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and a mental health assessment.

Cass therefore recommends precisely the psychological assessment that is no longer required in Germany to change one’s gender: With the Self-Determination Act, the traffic light coalition allows young people aged 14 and over to change their “marital status” without parental consent and with the help of the family court, without the obligation to seek advice from doctors or psychologists beforehand. From then on, the young people are given puberty blockers and other gender-specific hormones and can undergo gender reassignment surgery, which permanently endangers their own health and ruins their fertility, as TE reported.

Gender ideology in German schools

Gender ideology has now crept firmly into the educational plans of schools in Germany: In Hamburg, for example, new educational plans will be tested from August in which the topic of gender identity will be given a new priority, as a TE request to the Authority for Schools and Vocational Training revealed. The educational plans state that children and young people should get to know the “lifeworlds of people with different gender identities and sexual orientations as a matter of course” at school.

In the guidelines for school sex education in grades three and four, the topic of “diversity of gender identities and sexual orientations” is mentioned under the heading “role expectations and role stereotypes”. According to the guidelines for secondary schools, “gender identity” is dealt with in the fifth and sixth grades as part of the topic area “identity discovery”. In the guidelines for grades seven to eleven – i.e. from around 12 years of age – the topic of “cis and trans identity” is addressed.

In addition, the school authority’s press spokesman Michael Reichmann wrote to TE that the topic of “surgical interventions” can be dealt with with older students – from grade ten onwards – “with a view to the sociopolitical discourse”. However, this is not specified. According to Reichmann, how exactly the respective requirements are implemented is up to the schools. However, it should be avoided that children are overwhelmed. When and how the topic of “transgender” overwhelms children is not stated in the requirements for lessons.

TE also wanted to know how teachers in the “rainbow city” of Berlin approach the topics of “transgender” and “gender identity” to children and young people. But despite repeated requests to the Berlin Senate Department for Education, the responsible press officer Martin Klesmann did not respond. However, it can be assumed that transgender is at least as important as in Hamburg, which means that more and more children in Germany are being suggested a false solution to identity problems during puberty.