Such attitudes are encouraged and bolstered by ongoing misinformation about children and transition surgery. The reality – and it needs to be clearly and emphatically stated – is that children under 18 never have genital surgeries in the UK. That many people I have personally encountered believe otherwise is largely due to a hostile press and sensationalist headlines: one such, published in The Sunday Times in June 2019, referred to Mermaids, the UK’s leading charity supporting families of trans children, as a ‘child sex change charity’.2 Apart from anything else, this is entirely erroneous.
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