With the Closure of the Tavistock Clinic after the damning review by Dr Hilary Cass, followed by the public reaction to very poor taste advertising by Costa Coffee and by Nike, I had hoped that we have passed the high-water mark of the sex versus gender hysteria.
Last week the NHS gave some indication of what will do to replace the therapies that were previously offered at the Tavistock to children as young as three years old..
First, a minimum age limit of seven-years-old will be placed on referrals to gender identity clinics.
This is because children under seven will not have a sufficiently developed understanding of the reasons for, and consequences of referral to a “specialist incongruence service”. They haven’t the intellectual appreciation of sex and gender to comprehend the enormity of changing one’s sex or to analyse the personal issues and anxieties they that they have been experiencing in order to sufficiently distinguish the extent to which discomfort about their sex, is actually the real cause. To put it bluntly: They just aren’t old enough.
Hold on a minute!
How many children over the age of seven do have these intellectual capabilities?
How many teenagers, turbo-charged with hormones and facing all sorts of anxieties, can be sure of the necessary objective rational analysis of their feelings?
We don’t let them drive till they are seventeen. We don’t let them buy a beer till they are eighteen
We don’t let them buy a packet of fags till they are 21.
Yet we’re not going to intervene to prevent them embarking on an irreversible life-changing medical journey from the age of seven.
It may be better than it was, but it’s still barking.