When I think about my Scottish friends and the image I have of Scottish people in general, the phrase ‘no nonsense’ comes to mind. I think of Scottish comedians who would bravely skewer all sacred cows, politicians who would just tell it to you straight, ordinary men and women who could burst any balloon of pomposity at a hundred yards. I don’t know if that’s fair or not but that’s the sort of cultural stereotype I have of Scotland’s proud people. Down to earth, no nonsense, wickedly funny.

Yet today the Scottish parliament is debating and almost certainly will pass new proposals for gender self-identity which is why #NoMenInWomensSpaces is trending on Twitter today and the majority of those posting are women (well several page scroll downs revealed nothing but women and then I stopped scrolling).

According to the BBC the proposals are: “No diagnosis or medical reports would be required, and the period in which applicants need to have lived in their acquired gender would be cut to three months. One of the most controversial proposals is to lower the minimum age that someone can apply from 18 to 16. Anyone wanting to change their legal gender will still need to swear an oath about remaining this way for life – with it being a criminal offence to make a false declaration or application – and there would be a three-month “reflection period” before a certificate was issued.”

So despite transgender people constituting a very small minority (less than 0.5% in the UK apparently and my guess is that is inflated) their campaign for greater legal rights and recognition continues to cause controversy because they clash significantly with the rights of 50% of the population, women.

It’s worth being clear that opposing this shift as Christians is neither hate speech nor does it mean we want to criminalise LGBT people but that we do want to protect women. Women should not be erased from language, churches should be able to define women, and we should not find the question as hard to answer as some do.

It is worth noting that men are mostly not complaining or protesting because men are not losing anything. The tiny number of transmen requires zero changes to male behaviour, male spaces, male sport & poses no threat to your average bloke.

Sport is a key battleground because sport is universal, popular and powerful in shaping cultural narratives – the word ‘fair’, for example, when it comes to sport is critical. This is why transrights activists say it is unfair to keep transwomen out of women’s sport and women say it is unfair to let them in. Their reason is because the biological advantage is real: “Researchers found that, although the transgender women had about the same testosterone levels as the cisgender women, they had about 40% greater skeletal muscle mass. Moreover, they were about 19% stronger and had 20% greater cardiopulmonary capacity. Interestingly, transgender women’s athletic markers generally fell right in the middle between cisgender men and women.”

It’s likely that trans activists will publicly contest these studies because they have to. As Alan Jacobs says the playbooks is that, “Scientific studies that could lead to unfavorable social outcomes by providing support for our political enemies must be denounced and their authors shunned.”

The reason this male bodied advantage exists is because all of the transgender athletes studied went through male puberty. This puberty problem inevitably leads to the evolving strategy of transrights activists pushing for ever earlier medical transition for children who think they are trans to transition before puberty. As Andrew Bunt says,

The place in modern culture where puberty is perhaps most negatively viewed is in the transgender conversion. Some support the use of puberty blockers for young people who feel uncomfortable with their biological sex. They see these blockers as a way to stop the distress that can be caused by the development of secondary sex characteristics as puberty hits and progresses. Some openly talk about the need to stop young people from going through ‘the wrong sort of puberty’. Juno Dawson, for example, talks about young people who have ‘dodged the bullet of going through the wrong puberty’ by taking puberty blockers.¹ When young people hear things like this, they are hearing that puberty is the enemy. Puberty is a problem.

Puberty Positivity

But Bunt goes on to explain why this is wrongheaded.

The reality is, puberty is often good news for young people who struggle with their gender. We know that around 80% of children who experience gender-related distress will find that naturally goes away as they enter adolescence. Puberty seems to help resolve distress and avoid progress towards potentially life-altering medical interventions. The limited evidence that is available also suggests that puberty blockers may not improve things for young people with gender dysphoria We know that pausing puberty can have a negative impact on bone health, but it’s not yet clear what impact they it have on brain development, though we do know that a lot happens in the brain during puberty.

In the trans conversation, puberty is sometimes presented to young people as the worst thing possible, when in many cases it may turn out to be the best thing for them. This isn’t to say it will be easy, but in the long term it will probably be for the best. Puberty is an amazing thing. It’s the transition we are designed to go through in order to be our authentic selves.

This is why the Scottish proposal to reduce the age from 18 to 16 is a big deal and why increasingly the focus is on children and specifically girls. Yet here the transactivists are facing setbacks as well as victories. The Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London has been closed down because, “the NHS has been treating vulnerable children distressed and uncertain about their gender with potentially life-changing drugs, without knowing whether those drugs delivered the intended results, or actually made it harder for them to resolve their distress and uncertainty. Puberty blockers might have had precisely the opposite effect to the one that was so strenuously claimed.”

In addition both Sweden & Finland changed their medical guidelines to dramatically slow down and reduce pre-puberty medical interventions (puberty blockers). One of the reasons that alerted the experts to a problem was the massive increase in referrals of teenage girls. As Lisa Selin Davis says,

By contrast, the young people who sought care at Swedish clinics after 2015 were increasingly teen girls with multiple psychiatric diagnoses, and way more of them suddenly appeared than ever before. “It rose from 4 to 77 per 100,000 inhabitants,” Linden said. “The guidelines were written for what we thought was a smaller group of patients and also more homogeneous.”

The same trend was found in Finland, where clinicians first started providing medical treatments for gender dysphoric youth under 18 in 2011. This was due both to increasing awareness of the treatments proffered in the Netherlands and the UK, and what Riittakerttu Kaltiala-Heino, chief psychiatrist in the Department of Adolescent Psychiatry at Tampere University Hospital in Finland, called “political pressure that children and adolescents also have to have access to these assessments”—not just adults. Kaltiala-Heino and her colleagues saw the same drastic increase in female adolescents with GD around 2015. “The number of referrals skyrocketed,” Kaltiala-Heino told me. “They were five-fold more girls coming in.” In addition, they seemed to not have an organic kind of gender dysphoria; rather they “appeared to be very much influenced by other adolescents.”

What Happened in Finland and Sweden?

In other words there is a social contagion that teenage girls and hyper-online young men and autistic people (‘People who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people are’) are especially vulnerable to and the reasons for the massive increase in young people who say they are LGBT are social.

Lurking in the background is a deeper force than either recruitment or the media: human conformity. Human beings naturally want to “fit in” with other people around them. Implication: Small behavioral changes readily snowball over time. Being the first person to call yourself an X is terrifying. Being the tenth person to call yourself an X is daunting. As the number of self-identified X’s grows, however, the fear falls. Once you reach critical mass, people may call themselves an X first, and ask questions later.

Explaining the LGBT Explosion

This conformity is a powerful force that everyone uses (yes churches too) but is being used particularly effectively by trans activists. The trans side however make a claim that needs to be robustly dealt with, namely the threat of suicide. Here is how Helen Joyce responded to a questioner who made a similar claim, “I pointed out that if anything is known to be socially contagious, it’s suicide, and that perhaps the most wicked thing the trans lobby groups do is suggest to gender-dysphoric youngsters that their choices are transition or death. There is in fact no evidence that suicidality is massively elevated among trans-identified teens—but that would change if people like her continued to peddle the suicide myth.”

Let’s return to the power of conformity, consider this story of the Transformation of a Transgender Teen:

With every step Grace took toward the transgender narrative, she was applauded and congratulated at school and online. When she went public with her transition, “it was like eating the Mario Kart ability mushroom,” she said. “You start to glow and become invincible.”

As a girl, Grace struggled with socialization. “It was like walking through a minefield, and everyone had a metal detector except for me,” she said. “I just had a few good friends.”

As a transgender-identified male, Grace was suddenly popular. “Everyone in the school was like, ‘You’re amazing! We love you!’” she said. “All these kids who I’d previously occasionally said hi to in the hallway were going out of their way to say hi to me. I was cool.”

She was also powerful, because now she was a victim. “People were so obsessed with victimhood,” she said. “We’d be in GSA club, listing all the ways we were minorities. . . . I started telling people about the tiny sliver of Jewish I have in me because I wanted to be anything other than white.”

But behind this damaging of female bodies is a damaging ideology. Alan Jacobs describes the philosophy this way,

I don’t think enough attention is given to the three key axioms — typically unstated — of advocates for gender fluidity and gender choice: 

1. A person is (essentially) a mind that happens (accidentally) to inhabit a body; 
2. That mind rightfully has absolute power over its body — that is, in relation to the mind the body has no rights; 
3. Remedies for what the mind believes to be the deficiencies of the body are purchasable in the marketplace. 

In essence people are making money off teenage girls (& to a lesser extent boys) mutilating their own bodies and for the rest of their life being dependent on drugs.

Ross Douthat hopefully predicts that, “Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.”

Sadly it seems that time has not yet arrived in Scotland.