The Times- Talking up teen suicide risk is sick opportunism
LIBBY PURVES
Talking up teen suicide risk is sick opportunism
Claims that gender-questioning children will take their life if deprived of puberty blockers has no foundation in fact
The Times
Don’t wince away, bored from gender wars and Wes Streeting’s restriction on puberty blockers that suppress hormonal changes in physically normal children. Focus on one serious wickedness: the moral blackmail of troubled parents, a reckless and cruel spreading of lies.
As to sexuality and gender itself, its private mysteries offer plenty for philosophical debate, and a civilised country should respect idiosyncrasy and the right to be unusual.
As for the privacy of woman’s spaces, plenty has been written in these pages in defence of that. Rather, I want to talk about a particularly despicable propaganda foisted on frightened parents of children who, out of the blue, declare themselves “trans”, either spontaneously or pressured by absurd social expectations.
The biologically essential changes of puberty are rarely a smooth ride for any family but there is an evil campaign to tell parents that if deprived of a medication which risks bone, brain and future fertility, their child will kill themself. This message is out there, inflated through a million screens, banners and false statistics.
Some propagandists are careful, talking only of “an increased risk” of suicide. But many, like Clive Lewis MP, claim to know young people for whom the drug “probably saved their life”. Wilder adherents shout “stop killing trans kids!” and parents are asked by committed therapists: “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead son?” The charity Mermaids has claimed that 50 per cent of children questioning their gender attempt suicide.
So it was more than welcome last week that Professor Louis Appleby, a leading authority on mental health and a government adviser, confirmed that there is no evidence whatsoever of this. No surging rise in suicide by gender-questioning children. “The way this issue has been discussed on social media,” he said, “has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous,” and risks imitative self-harm, to which adolescents distressed for any reason are famously prone.
But ideologues rant on, blind to data and sense, shamefully backed by celebrities and MPs wanting to be cool. Some families who “transed” their own children, especially once they have moved on to irreversible surgery, inevitably double down and speak of it as an act of wisdom and compassion. It would, after all, be horrifying to any parent to think otherwise.
Again and again, organisations like the “Good Law Project” and Stonewall reiterate such talk, that social acceptance and waiting for adulthood are not enough because without a life-changing assault on their hormonal development hundreds of children will die by their own hand.
The sick opportunism of it should repel anyone, even those (I am one) who have long sympathised with the ancient but rare phenomenon of craving a sex-change.
To read Jan Morris’s description of feeling the armour of adolescent male muscle as imprisonment is touching, and I am glad she had a long and happy life after treatment as an adult (without, unlike some recent public trans women, embracing extreme sexualised self-styling: it is that drag fetish of show-offs like Dylan Mulvaney that tells teenage boys they need to dodge puberty if they’re ever to pass as a hot girl). It is good that society has evolved to tolerate and affirm the rights of adults who live modest lives in a sex they were not born to, but predicting child self-slaughter is no decent weapon.
Suicide always carries a special horror because the animal instinct for self-preservation is intense: we cannot help but snatch our hand from the fire or flinch from an attack or abyss. Reverence for life is a powerful morality; medicine cherishes even the frailest. And remember that until 1961 in England and Wales you could still be prosecuted for attempted “self-murder”: the last jailing was 1959.
The actual moment of taking your life remains deeply personal: the subject’s mind has moved to areas incomprehensible to most of us. Having lost an adult son this way I have probably had more conversations with survivors of this catastrophe than most, and seen the struggle to understand, the acceptance that we can’t, and the determination not to become collateral damage. And not — this is vital — ever to allow our lost one to become some sick, romantic “Young Werther” example.
Moreover, threatening suicide as a ploy is a particularly low form of blackmail. Spurned lovers sometimes deploy it, but “if you leave me I’ll kill myself” is a despicable (and probably wholly inaccurate) threat. It is useful to talk openly about mental health, and maybe admit to that psychiatric weasel-phrase “suicidal ideation” (not unusual, we all do it sometimes, recognising it as a mental escape-valve with no real intention). But talking about that ideation should always frame it as something to be defeated. Threatening it is deeply wrong.
So it is infinitely more unforgivable to threaten it by proxy against strangers with young children who get nervous about burgeoning womanhood or manhood, or flinch at silly social expectations to be a fighting superhero or a hot Disney princess. How dare campaigners with a bossy cultural (or pharmaceutical) agenda throw about false statistics threatening the worst of all parental nightmares?
Suicide is a complex mystery, child suicide even more. Though we campaign with good anger against cyberbullying, exam pressure and self-harm websites, the deed is unlikely to be rooted in one cause. It could be serious unrecognised neurodiversity, family stress, alcohol, drug or sexual abuse, cult capture or just a performative cry for help that accidentally succeeds.
Suicide is awful, complicated; not something to fling about, larded with lying statistics, to promote a fashionable ideology. Cease and desist.
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