Gender dysphoria diagnosis is just a child's feelings
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“it's just the feelings of a child... It's the feelings and the word of a child would make you give that child puberty blockers.”
Reducing a clinical assessment to "just feelings" sounds like a reasonable demand for objective evidence, and many people share the intuition that children's self-reports alone should not drive major medical decisions.
Every clinical assessment for gender incongruence draws on far more than a single conversation: it involves structured diagnostic criteria from the ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR, extended observation, psychological evaluation, and the whole family. That is not unusual in medicine. Pain, depression, anxiety, and dozens of other conditions are assessed substantially through what a person reports about their own experience, because no blood test or scan can replace it, and dismissing patient-reported experience as "just feelings" would empty half of medicine overnight. What the claim quietly erases is the professional judgement of the clinicians involved, people who have spent years learning to hear the difference between a passing mood and a persistent, consistent, insistent pattern of distress. The cost of believing it is real: trans children who have been through a careful, thorough process are left feeling that none of it counted, and the families who fought for that assessment are made to feel foolish for trusting the doctors who carried it out.
What I said at the time:
“It's what they say to you. It's how they, that's how they feel in their life... I'm a mother of five, and I listen to my child's feelings all the time. And for any, any person to say, we must not listen to that child's feelings, it's just, uh, it's just bizarre.”
Trans children and their families, who are made to feel that the careful clinical process they have been through is worthless, and clinicians whose professional judgement is dismissed.