In December 2023, the UK government released school’s guidance, proposing restrictions on social transition, including a complete ban on social transition at primary school.
The guidance is non-statutory, meaning schools do not need to follow it. Indeed, leaked civil service legal advice revealed that even government lawyers recognise the guidance as likely to be illegal, and likely to fail when it will be challenged in court. Any school considering following this guidance needs to know that their actions will likely be found unlawful when challenged in court.
Here I want to outline the reasons the guidance is not just cruel, but also anti-science. I will focus on one aspect of the guidance, the proposed restrictions on social transition, and the proposed ban on social transition at primary school. I am well-qualified to write on this topic, having focused my entire PhD on researching the experiences of trans children and families who socially transitioned at primary school in the UK, and being myself a parent of a trans child who similarly socially transitioned at primary school.
The guidance claims to be an effort to address ideology, but it is very clear that the guidance is entirely driven by anti-trans ideology, rather than by evidence, science, or indeed by listening to the experiences of those with lived experience of being or supporting a trans child.
Last week I published my 14th peer reviewed article on the topic of trans children. Within science and evidence based policy-making, peer review in credible journals is a vital part of assessing evidence, ensuring our decisions are based on the best available evidence. My latest peer reviewed article analyses and synthesises all existing studies on the topic of social transition. It examines them in detail, clarifying what evidence underpins their conclusion. Within all modern (post 2013) literature, evidence concludes that social transition is either beneficial, or neutral. The vast majority of studies conclude that social transition is beneficial for trans children. Just two studies conclude that social transition is neutral, neither beneficial nor harmful. My latest article examines one of those two studies, highlighting a wide range of limitations that undermine its stated conclusions.
The latest government guidance states that social transition is not neutral, raising the suggestion that it is either beneficial or harmful. If they looked to the evidence they can see that there is zero modern (post 2013) evidence that social transition is harmful, and multiple studies, of multiple types (qualitative, quantitative, retrospective), from multiple countries (UK, USA, Spain) demonstrating that social transition is beneficial, indeed critical for trans children’s well-being, self-esteem and happiness.
Claims that social transition is harmful are supported by the most pathetically flimsy of evidence, comprised of two main strands.
One flimsy strand of evidence used by opponents of social transition, looks to a 2011 published study of 2 Dutch girls, who changed their gender expression (wore trousers or cut their hair short) and then regretted changing their clothing and haircut due to the bullying that ensued. Neither child asked to be seen as a boy, neither child changed pronoun. There was no social transition in this study, nor is it clear that the children in question were even trans. I wrote about this back in 2017. The 2011 study on two girls who never socially transitioned was used by WPATH in their standards of care version 7 (published in 2013) to caution against social transition, guidance that has caused uncalculated harm across the world. (This poor science from 2011 also made it to version 8 of the standards of care).
You cannot tell me that 2023 social policy on social transition should be governed by a 13+ year old study of two children, neither of whom socially transitioned, or even asked to socially transition. The fact this same study is influencing gov guidance in 2023, ignoring all the continually growing body of modern evidence that social transition is vital and life-saving, is beyond belief.
The second flimsy strand of evidence used by opponents of social transition, argues that it is social transition itself that makes children remain trans. It argues that support for social transition somehow changes a child’s future trajectory, keeping children trans who would otherwise escape into a life of cis normality. The evidence for this claim of social transition ‘concretising’ identity is entirely speculative. Anti-trans voices look to the high degree of consistency in trans children in 2023, where a majority (but not all) of socially transitioned trans children continue to identify as trans into adolescence and adulthood. They compare this with studies from the 1950s-2000s, where children in gender clinics did not commonly identify as trans in adolescence. There is one humungous problem with this pet theory. Gender clinics in the 1950s-2000s did not focus on trans children at all. Instead they focused on boys who were deemed excessively and problematically feminine, boys who were referred to by research study leaders as ‘sissy’ or ‘proto-gay’. Clinics were not focused on trans children at all, instead they were focused on making feminine boys ‘man-up’, lest they become either gay or trans in the future. A scholar who experienced such gender clinics as a boy, who has written about the deep harm the experience had on him, is now a gay man. He wrote how conversion therapy at gender clinics left him feeling that there was something deeply wrong with him, that he was unacceptable for being gender non-conforming. These older abusive studies should in no way guide modern practice for two reasons. One, they did not focus on trans children. Indeed, one analysis from this cohort claimed, without no self-awareness, that they had deducted that a good way of distinguishing the children who would grow up to be a trans woman from those who would grow up to be a gay man was to actually ask them, whether they were a girl, with the majority i) not identifying as a girl and ii) not growing up to be a trans woman. Almost like researchers need to actually listen to those whose lives they seek to understand! The second reason to discount the findings from these earlier studies conducted from the 1950s onwards, is that there were deeply abusive and coercive sites of conversion therapy, a practice now recognised as abusive and harmful.
Literature conducted in the modern era in fact reveals the opposite conclusion to that speculated by anti-trans actors. A study by Olson et al concluded that social transition did not concretise identity, but was in fact a consequence of the children who felt most strongly and consistently being most likely to be supported to social transition.
All modern (post 2011) studies on social transition shows either neutral or positive impacts. The vast majority of studies show overwhelmingly positive impacts of social transition. The only two studies that show neutral impacts, were situated in gender clinics and have significant study limitations, including not bothering to actually ask the children in question for their views.
Positive benefits concluded by a majority of studies on the topic include reduced anxiety, reduced depression, increased self-worth, reduced suicidal ideation, reduced suicidal behaviour, improved mood, increased confidence, increased happiness.
Trans children have a right to their identity. They have a right to health, happiness, equality. They have a right to social transition. Denying a child’s social transition is oppressive, abusive and harmful.
For more detail, please do click on this article here:
Please see these articles on experiences of social transition:
“Euphoria”: Trans children and experiences of prepubertal social transition
“I never wanted her to feel shame”: parent reflections on supporting a transgender child
Read this research on the harms of denying social transition
“I Was Losing That Sense of Her Being Happy”—Trans Children and Delaying Social Transition
And these articles on trans children’s experiences at school:
Gender minority stress in education: Protecting trans children’s mental health in UK schools
Institutional cisnormativity and educational injustice: Trans children’s experiences in primary and early secondary education in the UK
Thriving or Surviving? Raising Our Ambition for Trans Children in Primary and Secondary Schools
Trans children have a right to a safe and happy childhood. Trans children have a right to social transition.
You can respond to the government’s abusive proposal here
Growing Up Transgender 