A recent video by huge trans YouTuber Blaire White has recently dropped and its pretty bad, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It’s essentially just scaremongering about something most people within the trans community are both aware of, and something which is often used to gaslight us into believing we’re not legitimate or really trans. Which can have devastating effects on trans people’s mental health.

In my personal experience of this, I recall looking up my problems online when I was 14. Finding out that it was probably gender dysphoria and then after psyching myself up to go talk to a doctor and get my issues fixed? I bitched out hard. I got scared, all the usual thoughts were going through my head — “what if I’m just confused?” “how can this be real?” “its probably because I have other problems and I’m looking for an outlet”. Then when I got to 20 and tried again, I remember telling my self “you’ll regret this, you’re not really trans, you’re just depressed”.

This whole narrative is built by design to make less people want to transition. Because being trans is not favourable at all in our society. We’re a problem, that needs to be swept under the rug rather than just accepted as part of our world. But sweeping us away doesn’t work, dysphoria sucks and the best and only known way to treat it is transition where its severe enough to warrant that.

With that said and the stage set lets look at things Blaire says in her video and respond to them from here on out. First up:

Detransitioning is something people never want to talk about

Not true, I will gladly talk about detransitioning. Did you know for example the detransition rates are less than 4%? Did you know that less trans dudes detransition than trans women? Did you know that often people detransition but then re-transition later in life? Did you know this is likely down to societal stigma meaning despite it being more comfortable to live as your TRUE SELF™ in terms of minimised physical dysphoria, its hard as balls to live that way when society is up your ass every day about it?

You probably didn’t. That’s why you talk about detransitioning as if it’s more important of a topic to discuss than it actually is. Trans people don’t tend to talk about it, not because its our dirty little secret, but because its irrelevant to trans rights, which are *for trans people*. You don’t talk about how many people think they’re gay but weren’t actually gay when we’re discussing gay rights — so why would this be any different?

There is one thing I will say about detransitioners though — we are absolutely failing them. When you transition you get a lot of support from doctors etc, when you detransition you do not. They have to go it alone and there’s hardly anyone else in that position to help them through that — because its so rare. We need to be more supportive of those who detrans, however we shouldn’t use detrans as a blunt object to bonk trans rights on the head with. That’s not cool.

Trans people want to believe every single person who says they’re trans just is

Not really? Speaking only for my self now, the point isn’t to insta-validate anyone as trans if they say they are. Its to avoid bullshit purity tests which only harm trans people. Blaire, you yourself have been involved in this culture of purity testing for trans before, as have a lot of YouTubers and most famously the Ms Trans UK pageant runner did it too. Stripping the winner of the pageant of her crown for as little as wearing boxer shorts to work out in.

If someone believes they are trans I will tell them the same thing I tell everyone else who believes they are trans. I hope you get a diagnosis and rule out any underlying issues before you take any permanent steps. I have no reason to say anyone isn’t trans because I don’t know them or their experiences at all. Nor am I validated or even invalidated by people being trans/not actually being trans, that makes no sense.

they don’t talk about detrans because also they like to maintain their position that children should be able to transition — if you can see an adult can make a decision and be wrong, clearly a child can too!

We (both trans people and the doctors who help us) know all about detrans though. We also know that only a tiny minority of trans kids in gender clinics have undergone any kind of transition — usually a social transition which is just clothes, name, pronouns. The NHS figures for this put the number at 8.9%.

Doctors are *VERY CAUTIOUS* about child transitioners, the entire reason we use blocker medication at all is because we want to really want to take our time with it. Otherwise we could just throw them straight on hormones and give them a childhood where they aren’t prepubescent until 16. But we don’t do that, because again, we’re super cautious to avoid misdiagnosis.

The rate of detrans in adults is below 4% — and yes, 4% is way too high. We can do better than that. But what we shouldn’t do is use that 4% as a weapon to attack the 96%, that’s fucked up.

Here’s a story of a 12 year old boy who underwent hormone therapy and then just two years later realised he made a huge mistake.

Actually you’ll find it was his mum who made the huge mistake, because the story you’re referencing is Patrick Mitchell. The child whose mum gave him her birth control pills because she was concerned and scared and the clinic she was using was incredibly underfunded — making it very difficult for her child to be seen by the doctor and be told he wasn’t actually trans.

This would likely have never happened if she had followed the guidelines and protocols of the clinic she was at. It would also never happened if we stopped throwing up stigma around trans people and trans kids as if its a valid argument and started supporting the clinics. They need more doctors, they need more money and they need more support. Otherwise we are likely to see a few more of these stories of parents who are scared and start behaving on instinct to do what they think is best for their child.

he halted his puberty which is going to have an impact on his development

There are no studies which support that puberty blockers will negatively impact the final outcomes of your development. There’s a lot of rumours about bone density, but as you can read in the NHS evidence base I linked above — no confirmed studies of this and just as much evidence to the contrary too.

I see a lot of parents transitioning their kids because they are boys who like barbies!

This is leaves on the tree yo. Not all boys who like feminine stuff or are feminine are trans, absolutely. But for trans kids those things are the way they are dealing with their dysphoria, they’re the end result of a much deeper issue, its just the leaves. If you follow those leaves down passed the branches, to the trunk and then down some more you get to the root of the issue, and that’s what doctors do over the course of many years.

A child taken to a clinic at the age of 5 will be there for 7 years before they have decided to prescribe any medication and it will be 11 years before they prescribe any medication which can cause permanent changes to your body. So trust me when I say that they’ve managed to get passed this little hurdle that both you and TERFs like to throw up as an ultimate invalidation. Yes, there are feminine boys and masculine girls — no, trans kids are not the same thing as this and yes, clinics do take step to avoid treating feminine boys as trans. You should maybe read the diagnosis criteria for trans kids, which states as follows:

“tomoyishness/girlishness is NOT sufficient”.

The younger you make the decision to transition, the more likely you are to regret it. The number of those who end up regretting transition and identifying with their birth sex is around 60–90% depending on which study you look at.

Woah, its such a good thing that I wrote this article looking at all of these studies mentioned by James Cantor to see if the conclusions he (and now you) have drawn from them is accurate.

Of the 12 studies Cantor links only 3 of them actually look at what we today would consider trans. The majority of them look at effeminate behaviour in boys and not at a profound sex disturbance which is persistent, insistent and consistent. One of these three is a meta study criticising the other 9 and the other 2 are the outcomes of that criticism — where we’ve started finally trying to standardise the language and properly discuss the condition in children.

Not even to mention none of these studies followed children who had transitioned. The first 9 follow effeminate or gay boys and the final two look at kids in clinics who qualify for diagnosis. A diagnosis doesn’t = transition, as we’ve shown above with the NHS 8.9% numbers.

I got tattoos and regret them ergo, trans kids shouldn’t be allowed to transition

You regretting something that isn’t at all related to trans health care and using that as an attack on trans people? Makes no sense at all.

*BIG LONG ANECDOTE ABOUT SOMEONE BLAIRE KNEW WHO DETRANSITIONED*

Cool. Here’s a little excerpt of a story from a trans kid I spoke to, a trans dude who took blocker medication — so basically the boogey man you warn against Blaire. I’m making a collection of these stories which I intend to post when I’ve got a few more, but for now here’s a few bits from one story which I think are relevant to this post and video.

I had been seeing a psychologist for other stuff at the time, but she didn’t really do much for me and when I started talking about dysphoria she had no idea what to do. So I stopped seeing her and my parents didn’t really know where to go next. I also live in a pretty small city which has no kind of gender clinic or resource center, so we were pretty lost. I really do want to highlight how many hoops there are to jump through. Over the past two years in which I’ve been working through this process, I’ve seen 5 different specialists (2 psychologists, a psychiatrist, a councillor and an endocrinologist). I’ve have had around 6 or 7 different reports written about me, and I’m still quite a while away from starting HRT and completing this whole process. In [country] we have an especially strict system for transgender minors, as in, if you’re pre-tanner stage 3 of puberty (as in, 11–13 years-old) it’s extremely difficult to receive any sort of stage one treatment. As in, you have to file an appeal to the federal family court in order to receive permission for stage 1 treatment. This is really expensive, you have to hire a solicitor and its time consuming as it can take 6 months to get everything done.

I hope this helps you understand why stories like Patrick Mitchell’s exist. I hope this helps you understand that nobody is rushing anything through and children aren’t just being thrown onto hormones at the drop of a hat. Your hysteria and fearmongering are not okay Blaire, or in the words of your boyfriend who has now become my favourite trans advocate: