In What Way is Surgery Reversible? Memories of Diversity Seminars in the Workplace

By an Anonymous Parent

Photo by Cecilie Bomstad on Unsplash

I have been unemployed now for almost 5 months, following a sudden and unexpected redundancy from my job of over 20 years at the end of 2023. But the memories of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) seminars still blaze brightly in my mind, as do the other problems that having a child in this madness brought me in my work.  

I live in the UK but was employed remotely for a US company, so I’m sure you can all imagine the “wokery” involved. To add insult to injury, I worked for a company that published health news for doctors.

The DEI briefing that is still at the forefront of my mind is one that was given to us by a junior colleague last summer, who I think cannot have been more than 25 or 30 years old herself.

She presented slide after slide of “facts” about “transgender” individuals. Including what she said was a “fallacy”—that the effects of medication and “gender reassignment” surgery are irreversible.

That was just too much for even some of my extremely woke coworkers, and someone did ask her, “In what way is surgery reversible?’” She didn’t really have an answer for that but waffled a bit and kind of side-stepped the question.

I had many things I could have said. But I didn’t.

Mainly because I was also in the difficult position of having to write news about anything to do with “transgender medicine”—as that was my beat—and my work was already being inspected from above, by managers who knew very little about the subject. I was trying my best to publish stories that revealed this medical scandal for what we all know it to be while hiding the fact that I had a teenager myself who was saying she was “trans”. So, I didn’t want to put my head above the parapet in the DEI seminar.

And to be honest, that seminar was nothing next to the scrutiny I had had over my work on transgender issues. For the last 18 months of working, everything I produced on the topic had to be green-lit by someone from above, and I was constantly, although not directly, accused of “transphobia”. So, for the most part, the stories just didn’t get published, and the company wasted a lot of money on my hours as an editor and on paying freelancers for articles they had written that we never ran.

The most galling thing was that the people approving the stories that I had either co-written or edited, knew very little about the subject of transgender medicine. I have a biological sciences degree and over 25 years experience of reporting medical news. None of my managers had any kind of scientific or medical training. Not that the latter stops people from blatantly ignoring clinical evidence or lack thereof—we know this from all the medical institutions that are captured by this lunacy, from endocrinologists’ associations to paediatricians to psychiatrists. And let’s not forget the ancillary disciplines—where is the accountability amongst pharmacists, psychotherapists, social workers, and teachers, amongst others? But I digress.

So, these managers simply said—amongst other things—that what was in any given article “wasn’t new”—the definition of “news”—even though it was often based on the latest publication in the medical literature or a new court ruling. For example, a US state that was trying to outlaw hormone treatment and surgery for minors with gender dysphoria. The result was that they simply ditched the articles.

Or worse, they sometimes edited them into unfathomable stories that I then had to publish, and which were frankly embarrassing to have my name on. 

Eventually, wearied by the whole thing—as well as what we were tackling in our own home—I just handed the work on trans issues over to someone else in my company who I knew would just produce whatever was requested of them. Because, as we all know, if you don’t have skin in this game, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Just be kind. Just write what everyone in your left-wing, democratic, circles have decided is right on this issue.

And if you try to tell people about the irreversible side-effects of supra-physiological doses of testosterone in females—even if taken only for a few months and then stopped—you can soon see most of them cloud over. It’s science. It’s complicated. They are bored and they zone out.

The terror of surgery is a little easier to convey, at least to friends and family in the UK.

I am grateful that here, people do still baulk when you tell them that for Gen Z, the notion of “top surgery”—aka a double mastectomy—has become mainstream. And that many of them view it as nothing more than cosmetic surgery. But how, in any way, is cutting off healthy organs, cosmetic?

It is simply mutilation.

For the 2 or 3 months after I stopped writing about trans issues last summer, there was just relief that I didn’t have to live a double life any longer.

Then came my redundancy out of the blue, just 3 weeks after the sudden death of a close family member. I don’t think the transgender issue was why I lost my job, more likely it was because I was experienced, highly paid and female, and I also didn’t kowtow to anyone but mostly spoke my mind on almost every topic, bar the transgender one.

Now I’ve moved on. I am freelancing and looking for a new job. However, I’m still fighting this madness in my own home, with my teenager who turned 18 last summer and who now believes she is an adult gay man and can do what she wants.

My daughter first identified as trans just after getting her first period, at 12. This was a brief flirtation of just a few months, and she soon desisted, seeming happy to be a girl again for two years. But then, when she was 14, along came COVID-19.

While I was stressed out about being locked in my home with my kid and husband for months on end, while trying to write about a worldwide pandemic, and not go mad, I totally missed what turned out—for me at least—to be the biggest threat.

My kid once again finding her way back into the murky world of trans-identification.  

Now, despite living on the “TERF-island” that is the UK, and despite having never worked, never earned any money and not “adulting” in any way since turning 18, my daughter has managed to do an amazing number of “gender-affirmative” things.

She has successfully changed her name and “gender” on her provisional driving licence and another document. She thankfully still has her passport, bank card and national insurance number—like a social security number—in her birth name and sex. I have told her to be extremely careful about what other things she changes as I am not helping her in any way with this. Time will tell how this develops.

She then consulted with a GP online and was prescribed testosterone by a pharmacy far away from where we live, who delivered it like an Amazon parcel. She knows full well that our local GP wouldn’t give it to her and that she would have to go on a waiting list for an adult gender clinic on the UK NHS to access cross-sex hormones in the “right” way.

But of course, she doesn’t want to wait. She has inattentive ADHD and waiting isn’t something that she is used to.

I threw the testosterone away. And told her that she wasn’t transitioning on our watch while living at home with two parents who do not think this is the right thing for her. If she wants to do it, I said she must be living away from home and financially independent. She will never accuse us of not trying to stop her.

She seems to have accepted this for now, but I do not trust her, and I am constantly watching for signs that she is furtively taking testosterone. But the cruel irony for these girls is that they cannot secretly take it for long—their bodies will give away the signs to someone like me, who knows what to look and listen for.

My daughter is, in every single way, a blueprint of the phenomenon that Dr Lisa Littman first identified and Abigail Schrier described in Irreversible Damage—a teenage girl with rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD).

Except now she is legally an adult.

So, my husband and I—along with many good friends in the same boat that I have met on this sad journey—are now trying to help our young adult navigate her way through her early formative years. Asking her to slow down, to wait until her brain catches up with the body she was born with. So instead of trying to change her body, her mind accepts herself for what she is.

It all makes me so sad and angry because my kid is also super smart, with a razor-sharp wit and she is someone who recognises phoney when she sees it. But she just doesn’t see this madness for what it is. She is brain-washed, her mind hijacked by a cult.

So, the saga and the agony continue. But at least, for now, I don’t have to deal with the additional pressure and stress of some clueless idiot in a DEI seminar telling me that all of this is normal. Because it’s not.

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