The event also marked the official launch of the Detransition Advocacy Network headed by Charlie Evans, 28, a woman who identified as a man for a decade. Evans decided to found the group to help the hundreds of young people she says have reached out to her after regretting their own experiments with hormonal treatments and surgeries.
MANCHESTER, England, December 2, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― A crowd of 200 people turned out for the world’s first gender detransition conference on Saturday afternoon.
“Detransition: The Elephant in the Room. Medical Ethics in the Age of Gender Identity” was held in Manchester, England on November 30. Organized by an independent feminist collective called “Make More Noise”, the sold-out event included a panel of medical and psychological health experts as well as young women who are “detransitioning” from attempts to make them men.
The event also marked the official launch of the Detransition Advocacy Network headed by Charlie Evans, 28, a woman who identified as a man for a decade. Evans decided to found the group to help the hundreds of young people she says have reached out to her after regretting their own experiments with hormonal treatments and surgeries.
The two-hour meeting was live-tweeted by the “Safe Schools Alliance UK,” a lobby group that seeks to ensure the safeguarding of children in schools, which includes protecting girls’ bodily privacy from males and all children from pressure to consider themselves transgender.
According to the Safe Schools Alliance UK, the meeting began with remarks by Evans, who stated, “We are not motivated by hate. We are motivated by solidarity, sisterhood, and a strong sense of justice.” Evans was followed by a female “detransitioner” named Max, who said her attempts to become male were about “escaping lesbophobia and male harassment.”
Another detransitioner, Kira, said she had been a “gender nonconformist child” (tomboy) until she began to feel social pressure to conform to femininity. Kira began hormone therapy and had a double mastectomy at 20. She came to realize, however, that these treatments were not evidence of self-acceptance.
“How can I possibly be loving myself if I am sacrificing my general health in order to change my whole being?” she asked.
The experts who spoke included Dr. David Bell, a consultant psychiatrist in the Adult Department of London’s Tavistock Centre, where the Gender Identity Development Service for children can be found. Bell said he doesn’t believe that gender “reassignment” clinics do follow-up checks on their patients. He also remarked that the term “puberty blockers” for the powerful drugs given to children to delay the onset of puberty is “misleading”. Bell believes that the drugs probably have physiological consequences beyond delaying puberty.