MP urges lessons to be learnt from detransitioner harmed by ‘affirming care’

A girl ushered into social and medical treatments to affirm her gender confusion has called it a “terrible mistake”.

Jenny, from Fareham, received ‘gender affirming treatment’ and underwent a double mastectomy by the age of 18. She later regretted the decision and her family sought help from their MP Suella Braverman.

Braverman shared that when Jenny’s parents came into her constituency surgery and explained what had happened, it solidified her opposition to transgender ideology.

‘Affirming zeal’

In early adolescence, Jenny developed depression and anxiety. She later chose to go by the name Jonny. Her parents sought help for her mental health, but Braverman explained, “the world beyond their front door had already made up its mind”.

Jenny was treated as a boy at school with classmates warned against “misgendering” her, and counsellors and clinicians “aligned themselves not with caution but with affirming zeal”.

Her parents were “presented with a grotesque ultimatum: ‘do you want a dead daughter or a happy son?’”

They consented to puberty blockers, testosterone and, soon after, surgery: “By eighteen, Jonny had facial hair, a broken voice and scars across the chest.”

Irreversible

Seven years later, the parents told their MP that “Jonny believed it had all been a terrible mistake. He wanted to return to being Jenny.” They asked for help.

Braverman explained how she wrote to the local NHS trust to advocate for them, but the medical intervention was “irreversible”.

She noted that there is a “growing cohort” of similar stories to Jenny’s, calling them “casualties, in effect, of an era that mistook affirmation for care. Their stories cannot be airbrushed away; they are warnings”.

Social transitioning

The MP for Fareham and Waterlooville said that “’social transitioning’ is often portrayed as harmless – a matter of names and pronouns,” but the Cass Review labelled it “a significant psychosocial intervention”.

She stated: “An absolute prohibition on social transition within schools would not be an act of cruelty. It would be an act of clarity.”

Braverman highlighted the need for this clarity, and criticised the new guidance issued to schools for “sanctioning social transition even within primary schools.”