https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/11/no-a-four-year-old-girl-is-not-really
Stormy is a four-year-old female child whose parents believe she is a transgender boy. They believe this because Stormy has expressed the belief that she has a masculine gender identity. The media loves a sensational trans story (guilty), and, as the parents of what might be Britain’s youngest ‘trans’ tot, Stormy’s mum and dad duly received their 15 minutes on the sofa of This Morning this week.
Daytime television isn’t known for intellectual rigour, but it would have been fair to expect a little journalistic curiosity. Instead, head gently titled, Holly Willoughby oozed sympathy, stating with surprising confidence: ‘As a society we tend to want to put people into a girl or a boy box that just fits with what we know. It makes sense, it makes us feel comfortable, but that’s not reality.’
In saying this, not only did Willoughby demonstrate an alarming level of credulity — she also entirely missed the obvious point. Stormy could be a little girl living outside of the ‘girl’ box. She could have short hair, wear trousers and like firefighters, while still being female. Instead, Stormy’s parents have opted to put their female child in the box marked ‘boy’, because it seems it is still considered shameful to have a child who does not conform. There is nothing progressive about this. It is informed by what was once known as sexism.
The idea of trans children ought to make any right-thinking person wince. Only a decade ago, someone who sought to change his or her sex was referred to as a ‘transexual’, and someone who wore clothes associated with the opposite sex was referred to as a ‘transvestite’. Stripped of the sexual connotations, the words ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ emerged. This happened at around the same time as the medical profession began treating children with gender dysphoria as if it were their bodies, not their minds, that needed fixing. The rebranding of what used to be regarded as an adult psycho-sexual disorder has created a new concept – the ‘transgender child’.