Graham Linehan smeared by radical trans activists for helping therapists

Graham Linehan took to Twitter to assist Stella O’Malley, psychotherapist, author, and advocate for children’s health in creating a list of gender-critical therapists.

For this, he was accused of advocating for conversion therapy.

But if there’s anything trans advocates should have learned from the recent revelations of young detransitioned people emerging on the other side of gender transition to find that the invasive surgeries and hormone treatments were a mistake, it’s that not every young person who outs themselves as trans should go through with transition.

Pink News called Linehan “king of the transphobes,” and on Twitter, predictably, trans advocates were calling for his removal from the platform.

Conversion therapy for homosexual teens has been roundly mocked over the years. It is inhumane to tell teens that their same-sex attraction is wrong and needs to be fixed. Additionally, it usually fails as a corrective, and everyone involved, from teens to parents would be better off accepting homosexuality than fighting it. That makes loads of sense.

But we don’t have large groups of young people who once believed they were gay entering their 20’s, realizing they weren’t, and finding their bodies and minds irrevocably altered, their reproductive organs butchered, and their lives destroyed. Why? Oh right, because accepting one’s self or one’s child’s same-sex attraction doesn’t require irreversible medical treatment, it simply requires an open mind, kindness, and love.

What makes trans so different from the rest of the LGB is that it requires something more than simple acceptance of self, it requires alteration of body and mind. Puberty blockers do more than delay gonadal development, but can prevent it altogether, cross-sex hormones cause sterilization and chemical castration, as well as change the brain and body, and surgery is about as invasive a thing as can be done to a healthy body.

Despite the persistent insistence by trans advocates that medical transition makes everything better for young people who come out as trans, there’s every reason to believe that this is not true.

There’s Charlie Evans and her Detransition Advocacy Network.

There’s the Pique Resilience Project, a group of young women who are speaking out against the cult of transitioning.

In an interview with the Pique Resilience Project, Helena, a member of the group, discusses how her transition began. “I went to an Informed Consent clinic. It’s a large national chain of medical health care clinics, and it was one appointment, it was one hour. On their website, they say that they do follow up appointments, for me that was not the case. And I told them that I was trans, I had dysphoria, they believed me, they didn’t ask any more questions, and I got my testosterone.”

Helena met with a therapist for just one hour before she was given a prescription for life-altering drugs. And after she began taking them, there was no therapeutic follow-up.

There’s Julia Beck and the Women’s Liberation Radio News.

And they’ve been here for a while. Katie Herzog wrote about detransitioners in 2017, and took a lot of abuse for it. So did Jesse Singal, who was threatened by his peers. Those that speak out against the medical transition of minors get ridiculed. But there is no other condition in which the healthy body of a juvenile person is drastically changed to match their mental idea of themselves.

Trans advocates would do their cause a service by admitting that not everyone who comes out as trans should go through with the entire transition process. What are trans advocates afraid of in making sure that everyone who undergoes transition wants to be there? How easily do they really feel kids should be able to access drugs and surgeries?

Should parents have no recourse but to assume that their child is fully aware of all of the risks of medically transitioning? Why do trans advocates want to limit the information kids and parents receive about the realities of medical transition? Why has the concept of “watchful waiting,” wherein parents allow a social but not medical transition, been scuttled? Why do grown-up trans advocates need to use children to justify their own existence?

Linehan has been vocal in the gender-critical space for some time, and he’s been willing to take the heat for it. In working with O’Malley to put together parent resources for therapists who are willing to meet with trans-identified kids for more than one hour before giving them a script for hormones, he is doing more for the trans cause than all the fast affirming therapists out there. Trans advocates should take a cue from Linehan. They should be on board with making sure than trans-identified kids are truly interested in living as the opposite sex, and less interested in pushing them all along the same path just to justify their own choices.