Children who would have grown up gay are transitioned
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“Often children, prior to this macabre industry that you're involved in, um, children would go through puberty, often gay, and come out kind of fancying someone and going, "Oh, it all works now." And you're eradicating that, that, uh, potential for someone just, for puberty just to sort stuff out, which it does. It c- it makes you a bit crazy for a time, but then you'll level and everything makes a little bit of sense. And you're totally eradicating the possibility of that, totally eradicating it.”
The claim that some children who present as gender-diverse turn out to be gay rather than trans is grounded in real desistance research, and the worry that medical intervention forecloses a natural developmental path is one many parents share.
The distinction that gets lost here is between sexual orientation and gender identity: they are different things, and good clinical assessment is specifically designed to tell them apart. Children who are assessed for gender dysphoria are not simply children who are a bit gender non-conforming or figuring out who they fancy; they are children for whom the distress is persistent, consistent, and present across contexts, not just a developmental question that puberty might settle. Blockers pause the process, they do not close a door permanently, and a child who stops taking them will resume the puberty they were pausing. The older desistance studies that inform this argument were largely drawn from populations that included children who would not meet current clinical thresholds at all, which makes the numbers look very different from what they actually tell us. The real cost of this framing is paid by the young trans person whose genuine distress gets reread as a phase, and who is left to go through an irreversible puberty in the meantime while waiting for life to sort itself out.
What I said at the time:
“If I can go back to what you were saying, so y- y- y- it- You make, you make the exact point. It's not about I w- I don't wanna go out there, they're too rough for me. Um, I don't wanna play with them. I'd rather play with these. Mm. It's, I, I fit in here. I am this group.”
Young trans people who are told their identity is a phase that puberty will resolve, and whose access to timely support is delayed on that basis.