“I wanted to slice off my breasts with a bacon slicer…Fortunately, I made it through puberty with my breasts intact, but had my parents been less no-nonsense, had they heard of transgender children and had we been living in America today, I might have been given a mastectomy…
At the end of the programme, Theroux says the choice to transition is, “a chance to exercise the most fundamental right we have - the right to be ourselves.” But the children are already being themselves - and we need to accept them as they are.
Instead of shoehorning children into prescribed gender roles, and “reassigning” them when they don’t fit, we need to question our adherence to gender roles. Force feeding children puberty blockers and cross gender hormones and putting them on the path to gender reassignment surgery, when they fail to conform, is actually an infringement of children’s rights to be themselves, as they are. As a society, we need to accept that sometimes boys like to wear dresses and sometimes girls like to wee standing up.“
One commenter on this article added:As a former tomboy, I’m leery of all this transing of children. I recall it was normal to find puberty traumatic and be unhappy in your body as a teen. We even learned that in health class. Whatever an adult want to do with their body is their choice, but slicing off a teenager’s breasts because she feels “dysphoric” is horrifying.