Britain's Gendered Intelligence
Grooming Young People on Gender Identity and Sex Acts
Gendered Intelligence is a British children’s charity which defines itself as existing “to increase understandings of gender diversity and improve trans people's quality of life.” Gendered Intelligence, like its sister organisation, Mermaids, has had free rein since its inception in 2008 to construct “truth” about the “transgender child” and to frame social and medical “gender transition” as socially just, and to slur anyone concerned with safeguarding as a transphobic bigot. Mermaids is currently under investigation by the Charities Commission, and I argue the Commission should also turn its gaze to scrutinise Gendered Intelligence.
The CEO of Gendered Intelligence, Dr Jay Stewart, self-describes as “assigned female at birth and now identifies as a man.” Like so many who work within gender charities around the UK, it is the experience of trans identification that allegedly qualifies Stewart to speak on behalf of children. Heavily influenced by the queer theorist Judith Butler, Stewart proposes that many children have a gender identity that does not correspond with the “sex assigned at birth.” The dissemination of concepts such as “assigned sex” rather than “sex” infiltrated the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). Tavistock psychologists, for example, invested Stewart, who has no psychological or medical expertise and whose doctorate is on British TV Soap Opera, with authority to advise them on best practices in dealing with the children presenting at the service.
Stewart argued that psychologists should “think about working with trans people … in relation to equalities and inclusion issues, not in terms of ‘gender dysphoria’. “Gender dysphoria is a clinical term, so in a way using these words is in itself the very naming of a mental health condition.” If a child voices an internal perception of “true” gender identity this must be affirmed. The revolutionary principle—what Stewart describes as a paradigm shift in knowledge and ethics—which will allegedly set children free is that biological bodies are subordinate to identity. Stewart told psychologists: “To emphatically instil a bodily reality (whether one is a girl or boy) into self-hood is to insist ‘this is who we are’ with no room for agency.” Freedom for children and young people, according to Stewart, lies in “dismantling the culturally ascribed power of the biological.”
Gendered Intelligence informs adolescents that in contrast to traditional sex education which focuses on bodies, “within the trans community we realise that it is identity that’s more important.” as linguistically-contrived identities become the focus, not somatic reality : “The fundamental thing … is that your identity is paramount. A woman is still a woman, even if she enjoys getting blowjobs. A man is still a man, even if he likes getting penetrated vaginally.”
Whilst Mermaids has come under scrutiny for advising girls to go behind reluctant parents’ backs to buy breast binders, Gendered Intelligence is no less guilty of providing children and young people with information about how to access resources for their social transition journey. Under the title “Knowledge is Power,” children and young people are advised, for example, where to buy breast binders and “genital packers” for trousers so that girls can appear to have male genitals, and how to navigate alternative nouns, adjectives and pronouns that cover the whole range of gender as an alleged spectrum (eg, genderqueer, gender-fluid, agender, etc).
Stewart deems young people capable of deciding for themselves whether they should take the medical pathway so the “inside” and the “outside” match: “It is not necessary to have surgery, take hormones, or have any kind of medical intervention to be trans and happy, and doing so in no way makes you more trans than you would otherwise be.” Gendered Intelligence’s publication, “Trans Youth Sexual Health Booklet,” illustrates in cartoon form the changes to bodies that young people can choose: The cartoon “trans man” sports a beard, body hair, a flat chest, and a vulva and the cartoon “trans woman” has breasts, no body hair, and a penis. In Stewart’s view, the possible loss of future sexual function and fertility is subsidiary to the alleged progressive capacity of young people to transcend the material conditions of their embodied existence. Stewart tells psychologists: “It is important that children and young people … can experiment, change their mind, try out new styles, express themselves.” The moral panic about “irreversible decisions” currently displayed by adults is driven by heteronormative assumptions. “Many people change their bodies in irreversible ways,” this booklet instruct, using as an example: “tattoos and “pregnancy.” The reason why some adults are exercised about the decisions children and adolescents make about their bodies is because “there is an undercurrent in our societal thinking that trans is wrong.”
Gendered Intelligence is founded on the idea that mainstream service programmes for children “purposely undermine what trans children and young people are saying about themselves, their feelings and what they would like to happen.” In Stewart’s view, professionals such as teachers, parents, carers, nurses, GPs, social workers, youth workers, therapists, counsellors and so on, in attempting to support children, “miss out the most important question: what does the young person want?.” Indeed, Stewart recommends a reversal of the orthodox adult/child role or the doctor/patient role, stating: “young people should be given more of a platform rather than less of one … and it is their insight and experience that should steer services, not vice versa.”
Without any democratic mandate, Gendered Intelligence, like Stonewall, has been successful at disseminating its ideas about sex and gender in institutions such as the law, prisons, schools, and businesses such as shops and restaurants. For example, in 2015 the CPS worked in partnership with Gendered Intelligence, Stonewall, the Ministry of Justice and a number of LGBT groups to develop an LGBT Hate Crime Resource Pack for schools. In 2016, Gendered Intelligence gave alleged “independent oversight” as an external consultant to the Ministry of Justice in the care and management of “transgender prisoners” which has resulted in the starting presumption is “a wish to respect someone in the gender in which they identify, once in the care of the criminal justice system” and “allowing transgender offenders to experience the system in the gender in which they identify." In 2015, a government document, in consultation with Gendered Intelligence, provided what it describes as good practice guidance for service providers, for example, that same-sex changing rooms and lavatories are “inclusive of transgender people as customers, clients, users or members.”
Gendered Intelligence’s day of moral reckoning is drawing ever closer, and at a speed I hope that will be accelerated by the recent NHS England interim service specification for the regional services that will now replace the Tavistock GIDS. Transgender Trend, an organisation of parents, professionals and academics based in the UK who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender, points out that the previous NHS service specification in 2016 was heavily influenced by transgender lobby groups along with the WPATH standards of care, an influence that can be seen in the ideological language and gender identity concepts which are peppered throughout. In contrast, the new version which is based on the interim report by Dr Hilary Cass, moves the service to where it belongs, within child and adolescent paediatric and mental health services. The NHS has effectively ended the “gender-affirming care” in England for minors long advocated by Gendered Intelligence and it repudiates the conceptualisation of gender-dysphoric minors as “transgender children.” In addition, there is a new recognition that many gender-dysphoric adolescents suffer from mental illness and neuro-cognitive difficulties. Psychotherapy will be the first and—usually—only line of treatment. Puberty blockers will be confined to research settings, and social transition will be discouraged for most. The Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM) draws attention to the fact that the new NHS guidance recognises social transition as a form of psychosocial intervention and not a neutral act, as it may have significant effects on psychological functioning. The NHS now strongly discourages social transition in pre-pubescent children and clarifies that in adolescents it should only be pursued to alleviate or prevent clinically significant distress or significant impairment in social functioning and following an explicit, informed consent process.
In Stewart’s view, the NHS recommendations represent a regressive step and the re‐pathologisation of young people's feelings and desires. Stewart contends that there is “a perverse, completely needless pathologisation of social transition,” adding: “Arbitrarily restricting personal choices like name and gender presentation isn’t just harmful and unenforceable in practice, it runs uncomfortably close to conversion practices. That this is even being considered by NHS England is dangerous.”
Stewart sees the recommendations as a backlash against gender diversity, the expansion of gender norms and possibilities, and restrictions on the child’s liberty, and concludes: “[I]t is clear from the service specification that NHS England still treats “transness” as a bad outcome, something to be avoided … we will not fix the problems in these systems until we start listening to the people who need them.”
There are severe ethical consequences for the safeguarding of children and young people in utilising different models of the child—the “gender dysphoric child” or the “transgender child.” For example, in the autumn of 2020, I sat nervously in the Royal Courts of Justice waiting for the conclusion of the Judicial Review of the Tavistock GIDS as to whether children have the capacity to consent to puberty blockers. A well-known feminist journalist sat next to me and asked the following question: “Do you really believe there is no such thing as a transgender child”? While she agreed the Tavistock GIDS should never have recommended puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria, she was nevertheless anxious that, if the Review was successful, children and young people who are “truly transgender” might be left without correct medical care. The problem, as far as she could see, was that the psychologists hadn’t devoted enough time to distinguish those children with gender dysphoria who could be given counselling to relieve psychological distress and those who had actually been “born in the wrong body.”
Thankfully by 2022, the fall of the Tavistock GIDS and the imminent collapse of Mermaids, and the new NHS specifications the question has been transformed from “Is there such a thing as a transgender child?” to “How could this ideology have taken a hold?”
If we truly want to answer the question of how gender identity ideology could have taken hold, we could reflect that Gendered Intelligence still remains free to offer training about “trans children” to staff in schools, colleges, universities and youth services and to provide one-to-one mentoring for young people. The alleged ahistorical “transgender child” that is at the core of the organisations teaching and mentoring is not a naturally occurring figure outside of discourse. The concept of the “transgender child” has been discursively shaped in our lifetimes by it, as well as by the Tavistock GIDS, queer theory, Mermaids, transactivist politics, and numerous social justice movements. Politicians, journalists, lawyers, writers, and assorted celebrities—in particular, those who identify as belonging to the left—virtue signal their progressive credentials by faithfully adhering to the narratives of the “transgender child.”
I presume that one day, as the gender identity edifice finally crumbles, they will feel too embarrassed to admit they collaborated in dangerous groupthink. In the meantime, it is time the Charity Commission turned its gaze on Gendered Intelligence.