Treating toddlers as ‘trans' is cruel. But blame activists, not parents

Telegraph

15-05-2025

'I think,' I announced in 1966, when I was 7, 'that I might be one of those people who isn't either a boy or a girl.'
My mother simply carried on with whatever 1960s household task she was busy with, said 'Mm-hmm?', then a comforting 'Oh well, you never know. What shall we cook for supper?'
If a seven-year-old me had uttered the same words in 2025, to a mother less sure of herself and of her daughter, there might have been months of 'sitting down for a chat', of 'going up to London to see that nice doctor again'; lots of probing of my 'feelings' by adults I'd never met. I would have felt strangely important; I'd have felt I had put my finger on something deeply significant.
And all the time, that seven year old might never have been able to articulate what I clearly remember was going on in my head.
Contemplating the endless mini-skirted legs of Twiggy or Diana Rigg on television, then looking down at my own chubby, scabbed knees, I decided that it was absolutely impossible for the latter to morph into the former; equally unlikely that my stumpy digits could lengthen elegantly, or my round tummy become a waist. The idea of becoming an adult is too big to deal with. The physical transformation seems quite impossible.
Every parent should be aware that it is far more important that a child enjoys being themselves than that they fit into a stereotype. The increased gender-specific nature of children's lives is dismaying for my generation; as a grandmother I am depressed by the racks of clothes for five year olds embossed either with pink unicorns, or fake Superman six-packs.
But today's young parents may not realise that things were not always so. In the 1970s Lego had an advert showing girls and boys, with near-identical (if tragic) Lesley Judd type pageboy haircuts, building Lego towers together. Unthinkable now: someone in Marketing realised that dividing all toys and games into girls' versions and boys' versions sells twice as many toys.
Thanks to their brilliant parents, so far all my grandchildren are allowed to be themselves first, their gender second. If my three-year-old granddaughter doesn't want to wear the dress Grandma made, we all know that it's because she's the most stubborn little person on the planet, not because she is experiencing gender dysphoria.
The parents who take little children to gender clinics are not evil. They have a woeful lack of common sense but are trying to be caring, in a world that has become fixated on excessively narrow and arbitrary definitions of 'normal' gender characteristics – such as that a prize chump like Andrew Tate is the pinnacle of masculinity, and that to succeed as a woman in American politics it is essential to look like a Barbie doll.
What is truly evil is that the anxiety of such parents trying to navigate such a world is being fed by professionals whose real duty is to bring them down to earth and encourage them to let their children be children and to develop their own personalities. I never did get Diana Rigg's legs, but at least my parents never doubted I was a girl just because of something I had said.