For a better world for trans kids, we need hormones to be readily available to trans people of all ages; facial feminisation surgery to be available on the NHS; drastically improved provision of lower surgery for trans masculine people; GPs who can read a hormone levels blood test result. We need a world in which we move beyond such a limited understanding of gender, a world in which we stop confining everyone to one of two narrow and stifling boxes.
The ongoing media circus around puberty blockers reminds me of the one that resulted from government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in 2017. Then, legal gender recognition became a defining issue of British trans rights – even though, as with the small number of trans kids who’ve accessed puberty blockers, very few trans people had actually used the GRA to change their legal gender.
Legal gender recognition and access to puberty blockers are neither what make us trans nor the only tools we need to live long, happy lives. Trans people do not spring into existence when our genders are recognised by the state, any more than puberty blockers create trans kids.
I asked Blue, 17, one of the young activists who slept outside Streeting’s office this week, what would improve trans kids’ quality of life. “A world where putting a gender marker next to name and date of birth is remembered as a bizarre obsession we’ve thankfully moved on from,” she said. “Hormones and puberty blockers can be stocked next to birth control in pharmacies and we never have to ask for permission because there is nothing to change. The formerly trans are able to have autonomy over our bodies, and the formerly cis are free to make their bodies their own, rather than measuring themselves by deviations from the all too stale concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.”
“The only thing it takes is acceptance by wider society and a shift away from this whole culture war nonsense,” Blue added. “We are people too, with our own hopes and dreams. To be constantly trampled on by the government is quite dehumanising.”
Trans kids need respect and support from their families, teachers, peers and politicians; equal and timely access to healthcare, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones; to grow up without being confined by gender; and to be listened to on issues that affect them. They need the government to stop using them to distract from political failures to tackle the climate crisis, genocide, ballooning corporate profits and child poverty.
Ultimately, children should be free to be themselves no matter whether they go through a puberty that is driven by hormones their own bodies make, or through a puberty driven by hormones they take. A better world for trans kids looks like a 15-year-old girl being able to get hormones without needing the approval of her parents or a psychiatrist, whether she wants them for contraception or for gender transition.
But puberty blockers alone are not a silver bullet that can make the UK a safer and easier place for trans kids to grow up in. For trans kids to be free to be themselves, we need a better world. Until then, as the state continues to attempt to squash trans kids out of existence, in the words of Trans Kids Deserve Better: “We will live out of spite.”
