Trans surgeries are drastic decisions based on things we don't know
Andrew Gold said:
“To then make what I would consider to be drastic and draconian measures such as life altering surgery on, uh, young people, sometimes children, it's happened on as well, teenagers, I should say. That's only 1 side of course, the other side being allowing men as sex, and you would agree these sex men into women's spaces and toilets. These are huge drastic decisions that we've made as a society based on something that you yourself say we don't know.”
The precautionary framing is persuasive: if experts admit uncertainty about the nature of gender identity, it seems reasonable to pause before irreversible interventions. Many parents and observers share this concern.
Genital surgery on minors is not performed in the UK or in most comparable countries, full stop. What is actually available to young people is a much more graduated range of interventions, puberty blockers, and in older teenagers sometimes hormones, each with a different evidence base, a different reversibility profile, and a different age threshold, and conflating all of them with surgery is how a precautionary argument that sounds reasonable becomes one that is simply wrong. The philosophical uncertainty Helen acknowledged, about the deep nature of what gender identity is, is a different thing entirely from clinical uncertainty about whether dysphoria is real or whether treatment helps: the evidence that affirming care reduces distress in carefully assessed young people is substantial and consistent. When a young person and their family are left with the impression that their child is at risk from interventions that are not on offer, the harm is not abstract: it delays real help, increases real suffering, and leaves families frightened of a system that was never proposing what they were told it was.
What I said at the time:
“We didn't hear from the person who does know. And that's the person who lives it every day. And that's why that's the person that we should be listening to and asking about it.”
Trans young people and their families, who face unnecessary alarm and policy restrictions based on a conflation of philosophical uncertainty with clinical uncertainty.