by Stella O’Malley, spiked
The spread of gender ideology has exposed the rot in just about every institution that our civilisation depends on.
One of the questions I’m asked most often is: ‘Don’t you ever get tired of talking about trans?’ Which is fair enough given my work at Genspect, which advocates for a non-medical approach to gender distress; my book, When Kids Say They’re Trans; and the Channel 4 documentary I presented, Trans Kids: It’s Time to Talk.
But the honest answer is no. Not because of ‘trans’ per se, but because of what the trans issue has uncovered. The subject itself isn’t endlessly fascinating – I’ve always been a generalist and never been a single-issue zealot. However, the trans issue is a prism through which almost every major cultural, political, ethical and psychological question of our age is refracted. The debate around transgender identity exposes problems that extend far beyond medicine or mental health. That’s why I no longer define trans as an ‘unfolding medical scandal’ but an ‘unfolding medical and institutional scandal’. To name just a few areas:
Medicine and healthcare
‘Gender medicine’ has revealed what happens when medicine becomes consumer-driven. Technical advances have made possible a growing number of elective medical interventions – gender medicine, commercial surrogacy, assisted dying, some forms of abortion – which are increasingly presented as ‘healthcare’ simply because they are medically possible. The distinction between treating illness and fulfilling consumer demand has become dangerously blurred.