The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

the potential for children to be misdiagnosed and encouraged to stave off puberty with hormone blockers because they do not fulfil old-fashioned gender stereotypes is far from trivial. At the Tavistock Centre in London, a gender clinic that has been accused of ‘fast-tracking’ children into life-altering treatments without proper assessments of their psychological and social circumstances, there was a running joke among the staff that soon ‘there would be no gay people left’. The perception that some of these treatments are tantamount to ‘fixing’ gay children to better align with heteronormative expectations is controversial, but understandable. There is overwhelming evidence that gender nonconformity in childhood is a reliable predictor of homosexuality in later life. A preponderance of ‘detransitioners’ – those who have undergone sex reassignment surgery and later wish to revert – are gay men and lesbians. Although the notion that a child can be ‘born in the wrong body’ has gone out of fashion, it was for many years a common mantra among trans activists.