Last weekend, Killarney, Ireland, hosted two conferences related to transgenderism. One was the European Professional Association of Transgender Health (Epath), whose mission is to promote the health and rights of “transgender people in Europe.” The second was a “counter-conference,” hosted by Genspect, an organization whose mission is to “champion a healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I managed to catch some of the Genspect conference virtually. It was thoroughly impressive. The lineup included Lisa Littman, a medical doctor and researcher who coined the term “rapid onset gender dysphoria”; Michael Biggs, associate professor of sociology at the University of Oxford, who has played a major role in exposing the lack of evidence justifying puberty blockers; and Ken Zucker, an international authority on gender-related distress in children who has worked in the field for four decades.
One of the major themes of the conference was how vulnerable patients are being misled.
Stella O’Malley, the Irish psychotherapist, and creator of the 2018 Channel 4 documentary Trans Kids: It’s Time to Talk explained how vulnerable teenagers are “falling for the most bewitching line [in] the world . . . when you’re filled with self-loathing, you’re awkward and feel ugly . . . [and] somebody tells you, you can take some medicine and you can be a different person. And that different person can have a different name and a different identity. And nobody will be able to refer to that old, loathsome self.” Indeed, the new person could be “very successful, socially . . . maybe they might even be like one of those influencers online.”
Maya Forstater, the executive director of Sex Matters, a campaign group for clarity on sex in law and policy in the U.K., spoke about how if it were clear to those seeking transition that “people won’t comply” with the demand to treat them as members of the opposite sex in every circumstance, then it would become “clearer to see that what the doctors are doing is . . . objectively harmful.” Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, added, “The unstated promise has always been that you actually can change sex.” Patients are led to believe that if they “go through with all this stuff, what comes out at the other end is something everybody else will accept.”
Perhaps if more were told the truth, they’d think twice about transitioning.