Keira Bell's story shows clinicians should stop young people transitioning
Andrew Neil said:
“Kira Bell is probably the most well known detransitioner. She recalls she says this, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that's typical of teenagers. I mean, isn't it the job of adults and clinicians like yourself to understand that truth and focus on preventing young people from ruining themselves and mutilating themselves until they are old enough to really take a decision about their future, not encourage them at that age?”
A first-person account from someone who says they regret transitioning is emotionally powerful and hard to dismiss. The argument that teenagers are by nature impulsive and that adults should protect them from irreversible decisions is a widely shared intuition.
Keira Bell's account deserves to be heard, and regret when it happens is a real loss that nobody should dismiss. But one person's experience, however painful, cannot be the basis for clinical policy that affects thousands of young people whose lives genuinely improve with care. The detransition rate across the research is consistently low, and many who do detransition cite social pressures rather than a change in their sense of who they are. What the framing of the question leaves out is this: gender clinics do not encourage transition, they assess it, often over years, with young people and their families together. When a rare outcome is used to shut the door on everyone, the people who pay that price are the trans teenagers whose own certainty gets dismissed, in advance, as nothing more than a phase.
What I said at the time:
“Nobody's encouraging them. And, you know, the emotive words that you use such as mutilation and sexual dysfunction and infertile, You know, these are words that we use, um, to criticise, to try and withdraw care, withhold care from transgender people.”
Trans young people are harmed when a rare outcome is used to justify denying care to the majority, and when their own certainty about their identity is pre-emptively dismissed as teenage impulsiveness.