Clinicians providing trans care to children are abusers
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“I think anyone involved in that industry is a child abuser.”
Framing child medical treatment as abuse is a serious charge that lands hard because child protection is a value almost everyone shares, and the word "abuser" carries enormous moral weight.
The clinicians providing paediatric gender-affirming care are following established international guidelines, working alongside families, and in many cases operating under legal oversight: they are doing regulated medicine. Child abuse has a precise legal and clinical meaning, and it refers to harm inflicted on a child, not to a multidisciplinary team carefully weighing a young person's wellbeing with their family in a consulting room. There is a real conversation to be had about how we get care right for trans children, and that conversation matters enormously, but it cannot happen when the people having it in good faith are being called abusers. The cost of language like this is concrete: clinicians leave the field, families are made to feel like criminals for asking for help, and the children who needed that care are left without it.
What I said at the time:
“you're so far away from a person, um, sitting with their doctor making medical decisions.”
Clinicians working in good faith in a difficult field, trans children whose care is delegitimised, and families who are made to feel they have harmed their child by seeking medical help.