FIRST Minister Michelle O’Neill has been defending her decision to green-light the banning of puberty-blockers by Health Minister and soon-again-to-be UUP leader Mike Nesbitt.
“Children, parents and clinicians need to have full confidence in the effectiveness and safety of medical treatments,” she said. “Health care and clinical decisions need to be based on the scientific and medical evidence.”
Absent from that list of those who need to have full confidence in the health service is the Trans community, who – as is so often the case – have been sidelined while one party after another gorges on the culture wars feast that is the Trans issue.
Those people who have convinced themselves that Trans people are suddenly one of the most pressing problems facing them in their daily lives – and there are many good people who have arrived at that point – should consider for a second why the fringest of fringe issues rocketed in a few short years to the hottest of hot-button issues. Why did something that almost nobody thought about, much less worried about, suddenly inflame emotions to such a degree.
Throw your mind back to the years pre-2016 when Europe was an issue of such minuscule concern in the UK that it barely registered on the richter scale of societal worries. Then David Cameron called the referendum and in a tsunami of sub-racist media talking points and mob-friendly political posturing the issue was propelled to the top of the agenda.
Similarly, and around the same time, the Trans question was a settled and utterly uncontroversial matter until it was identified in far-right focus-grouping as a potential goldmine for those who profit from fear and division. And in a similarly speedy fashion, the Trans community – too tiny and powerless to fight back – was cast in the role of that most devastating of populist weapons: a threat to the family.
The facts speak for themselves in terms of how the Trans community impacts on the lives of those not in that community: It doesn’t. The headline-friendly mantras of ‘What is a Woman?’ and ‘Protect Our Children’ have come into being as a response to a manufactured ‘threat’. But it’s hard to blame the people who have been taken in by the gaslighting and fearmongering; the desire to protect children and the family is hardwired into human DNA and that fear has been weaponised to a massive extent by sophisticated manipulators.
Sinn Féin cites the Chief Medical Officer as the rationale for their decision to part company with the Trans community on the issue of puberty-blockers. That is a superficially attractive argument in relation to a complex and technical matter. But the simple fact of the matter is that there is no consensus on the matter and any decision to remove a treatment that improves and even saves the lives of vulnerable youngsters cannot be taken in an environment of such political hostility.
