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This is a common activist argument. It often arrives pre-loaded with moral certainty, as if the analogy itself settles the question. That should set off your spider-senses immediately: when moral certitude and ideological correctness are doing the work, argumentative rigour usually is not.
The claim is familiar. Left-handedness once looked rare because it was stigmatized and suppressed; stigma eased, reported rates rose. Therefore, the rise in transgender identification among youth should be read the same way.
The analogy is rhetorically useful. It is also weak.
It forces two different kinds of phenomena into one moral script. Left-handedness is a motor preference: early-emerging, directly observable, and generally stable across the life course. Childhood transgender identification is not that. It involves self-interpretation, language, social meaning, and developmental concepts that mature unevenly. Whatever one’s broader politics, these are not the same kind of thing. Treating them as equivalent does not clarify the issue. It pre-loads the conclusion.
The first failure is developmental. Handedness does not require a child to grasp an abstract social category. A child reaches for a spoon, a crayon, a ball. The preference is visible in action. Gender identity claims are different. They depend on how a child understands sex categories, role expectations, persistence over time, and what it means to “be” a boy or girl beyond clothing, imitation, or preference. That is a heavier cognitive task. Piaget and Kohlberg do not settle today’s policy disputes, but they do establish a relevant caution: young children often reason concretely, and stable identity concepts develop in stages. A child can show a hand preference before the child can fully articulate an abstract identity claim in a mature sense.
That difference changes what counts as evidence. Handedness does not need interpretive reinforcement to remain legible. It persists without adults affirming a narrative about the child’s inner state. Childhood gender self-description does not operate that way. It unfolds inside a social field: family language, peer dynamics, institutional scripts, online models, and adult interpretation. Saying that does not make every case shallow or insincere. It does mean the left-handedness analogy smuggles in false simplicity by equating a physical preference with a socially mediated self-concept.
The second failure is pattern. The rise in reported left-handedness is commonly explained, in large part, by declining suppression and changing norms around forcing children to write with the right hand. The increase was broad and gradual. It was not driven by intense peer clustering in narrow demographic bands. Recent increases in transgender identification among youth have shown a different profile, including marked concentration in particular age and sex cohorts in some settings. That pattern is harder to explain by destigmatization alone. At minimum, it supports a mixed account in which social influence, peer effects, and online environments may contribute in some cases. That is not proof of a single-cause “contagion” model for every child. It is enough to show that the left-handedness analogy is doing more moral work than explanatory work.
The third failure is stability. Handedness, once established, is typically stable and does not initiate a pathway of medical intervention. Childhood gender distress is more variable. Longitudinal studies from earlier clinic-referred cohorts often found that many children presenting with gender dysphoria did not continue to identify as transgender in adulthood, especially after puberty. Those findings need careful handling. They come from older cohorts, older diagnostic frameworks, and a literature now heavily contested on definitions and generalizability. Even with those caveats, the central point remains: childhood gender distress has historically shown developmental fluidity in a way handedness does not. That alone should make the analogy suspect.
The practical asymmetry is harder to ignore. If society was wrong to suppress left-handedness, the correction was simple: stop forcing children to switch hands. No endocrine pathway. No fertility implications. No irreversible surgeries. No high-stakes clinical decisions under uncertainty. Pediatric gender care is not identical in stakes or consequences. That does not answer every clinical question. It does mean “this is just like left-handedness” is not an argument. It is a reassurance strategy.
A more honest framing is available. Stigma can affect disclosure and prevalence reporting without making every rise in identification analogous to left-handedness. Some young people experience deep and persistent gender distress. Childhood identity development is also shaped by cognition, peers, institutions, and timing. Those claims can coexist. Compassion does not require category collapse.
The left-handedness comparison survives because it is emotionally efficient. It offers a ready-made progress narrative and casts skeptics as yesterday’s moral failures. Efficient is not the same thing as accurate. If the aim is responsible care for vulnerable young people, the first obligation is conceptual hygiene: use comparisons that illuminate developmental reality, not analogies that flatten it.
References
- Kohlberg, L. (1966). A cognitive-developmental analysis of children’s sex-role concepts and attitudes. In E. E. Maccoby (Ed.), The Development of Sex Differences. Stanford University Press.
- Gilbert, A. N., & Wysocki, C. J. (1992). Hand preference and age in the United States. Neuropsychologia, 30(7), 601–608.
- Steensma, T. D., Biemond, R., de Boer, F., & Cohen-Kettenis, P. T. (2011). Desisting and persisting gender dysphoria after childhood: A qualitative follow-up study. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 16(4), 499–516.
- Singh, D., Bradley, S. J., & Zucker, K. J. (2021). A follow-up study of boys with gender identity disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 632784.
- Cass, H. (2024). Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People (Final Report).
This is an example of what happens when you allow the radical leftists to move themselves from the margins to the centre of a organization aka organizational/institutional capture. Lesbians are not welcome and other same sex attracted individuals are not welcome.
At Pride…
So really, once you centre white heterosexual men at Pride – can you even call it ‘Pride’ anymore with any sort of nod to respecting reality?
Finally some positive news on the gender front. The Tavistock Centre in the UK is to be shut down because they are not adequately helping the children sent there. The BBC reports –
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“Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been told to shut the clinic by spring after it was criticised in an independent review.
Instead, new regional centres will be set up to “ensure the holistic needs” of patients are fully met, the NHS said.
The trust said it supported plans for a new model due to a rise in referrals.
The changes will take place after an independent review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, said the Tavistock clinic needed to be transformed.
She said the current model of care was leaving young people “at considerable risk” of poor mental health and distress, and having one clinic was not “a safe or viable long-term option”.
Challenging Gender identity is career kryptonite for mental health care professionals. Speaking out against it carries a high social cost as transgender activists and those on board with the anti-reality transgender ideology have made the the scientific debate and conversation around the issue nearly untouchable. The similarities to religious dogma and how heretics were punished/excommunicated is apt in this situation. It took an independent review and court cases to shine the light on dubious practices – gender affirmation therapy for instance – and bring them into question.
“There were rising referrals and a long waiting list but at the same time some former staff were raising concerns about the way it operated.
Then, former patient Keira Bell went to court saying she had not been challenged enough about her decision at 16 to take drugs that began her transition from female to male – a decision she later regretted.
Earlier this year, Dr Cass’s report said there was a lack of understanding about why the type of patients the clinic was seeing was changing, with more female to male patients and more autistic children. Dr Cass also highlighted inconclusive evidence to back some of the clinical decision making.”
Yeah, the gender-magic has run afoul of good evidence based medical practice –
In an interim report earlier this year, Dr Cass said:
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The service was struggling to deal with spiralling waiting lists
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It was not keeping “routine and consistent” data on its patients
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Health staff felt under pressure to adopt an “unquestioning affirmative approach”
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Once patients are identified as having gender-related distress, other healthcare issues they had, such as being neurodivergent, “can sometimes be overlooked”
Most of the current psychological treatment of gender disorders has been warped by transgender ideology and activists. Gender dysphoria is the only body morphic disorder that has a affirmative care approach.
What does this look like? Well consider Anorexia – the idea behind most treatments is to guide the patient back to a body image that comports with reality and to dispel the illusions and misconceptions of being “fat” while in fact being severely underweight and malnourished. Affirmative therapy would agree with the anorexic’s self diagnosis and would look for ways for them to flourish in their quest to be thin…
Gender affirmation therapy starts with the preordained conclusion that the child or person in question perception of their gender and body are correct and work toward that goal.
Ludicrous.
“Dr David Bell – not related to Keira Bell – is a former consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock NHS Foundation Trust, where he raised concerns. He said it was a “good thing” the service was closing down.
Proper funding was needed for mental health services for children and adolescents, he said.
He told the BBC: “Some children have got the double problem of living with the wrong treatment, and the original problems weren’t addressed – with complex problems like trauma, depression, large instances of autism.”
The tide is beginning to turn against this wave anti-science, transgender ideology, and not a moment too soon.
“Trans activism is a massive experiment in what happens when you accommodate serious mental issues as perfectly within societal norms. Trans activism can justify – or at least mitigate – behaviour like screaming “Witch” in a woman’s face because they’ve essentially adopted a social model of trans rights: the behaviour exhibited by any given trans person is communication in service of being listened to, and fellow trans activists will see the fact that it’s not them being screamed at as supporting the idea that if only society wasn’t so transphobic, distressed people wouldn’t find themselves forced to communicate in this way. And that is what provides a safe space for male people to be publicly abusive to women.”
Twitter usually isn’t the best place to find valuable insights into complex topics and ideas. I do like to be proven wrong though, and that was very much the case when I saw this thread by “H”. This person precisely identifies a several key points where the ideology of transgender has gone markedly afoul. Much has to do with the correspondence between their activism and narcissistic male entitlement.
Common threads do exist between feminism and the trans movement. The current focus though of putting the validation of (usually) men’s gender-delusions ahead of female rights makes progress in this area difficult at best.
Do Women Have the Right To Defend Their Sex – Michael Biggs
Three female academics spoke about women’s rights at Oxford on 25 October to an audience of about two hundred, composed mainly of feminists. Such a meeting would have been unremarkable in 2009, 1999, 1989, or 1979; even in 1969 it would have caused bemusement rather than outrage. Today, however, the meeting was so controversial that the University of Oxford deserves credit for allowing it to go ahead. Indeed, similar events were re-cently cancelled, or re-arranged, by Massey University in New Zealand and Simon Fraser University in Canada. At stake are two fundamental principles.The first is whether women have the right to defend their sex – to preserve, for example, female-only rape shelters and sports competi-tions. The second is whether we have a right to question fashionable doctrines of gender.
The event at Oxford – entitled ‘A woman’s place is at the lectern’ – was arranged by Woman’s Place UK (WPUK). This organization was formed in 2017 by left-wing feminists after an attendee, Maria MacLachlan, was physically assaulted on the way to a meeting discussing the government’s proposal to amend the Gender Recognition Act. To quote from WPUK’s manifesto:
‘We are against all forms of discrimination. We believe in the right of everyone to live their lives free from discrimination and harassment. Women face entrenched and endemic structural in-equality. … This is why sex is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act (2010) which we believe must be defended.’
I helped WPUK to book a room in Examination Schools for the meeting, for which it paid the normal rates. The Proctors’ Officers warned of a substantial risk of physical disruption. WPUK’s first meeting in Oxford, at the Quaker Meeting House in April 2017, was besieged by about fifty shouting protesters.2 Demonstrators outside the WPUK’s previous meeting, in Brighton, blocked the entrance and tried to kick in the windows.3 Therefore the University insisted that the organization pay for six pri-vate security guards as well as four University staff and obtain liability insurance for £10 million.
The meeting featured three speakers: Professor Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History at Oxford; Dr Susan Matthews, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton; and Raquel Rosario Sanchez, doctoral student at the Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the University of Bristol. The chair was Allison Bailey, a criminal defence barrister at Garden Court Chambers who, incidentally, grew up in Cowley.
When the meeting was announced, transactivists (activists campaigning for the transgender cause, most of whom do not identify as transgender but style them-selves ‘cisgender allies’) reacted with predictable outrage. Trans Action Oxford emerged as a new account (@trans-actionox) on Twitter. It asserted ‘a direct correlation be-tween the proliferation of groups like “A Woman’s Place” and the rise in transphobic abuse in the UK’.4 To quote from their statement of 17 October:
‘A proper commitment to academic freedom uplifts voices from all marginalised groups, including those of trans people. It recognises that freedom of expression does not extend to bigotry, and that bigotry serves to silence the vulnerable.’
According to Trans Action Oxford, then, anyone who disagrees with their doctrines has no right to speak – and, as we will see, must be expelled from the University. There is a real asymmetry here, because WPUK has never denied freedom of expression to those who disagree with its principles.
Trans Action Oxford’s statement was signed by several bodies including various groups within Oxford Univer-sity Student Union and the Oxford University LGBTQ+ Society. Other signatories were Beyond the Binary, a project at the Pitt Rivers Museum (paid £91,000 by the Her-itage Lottery Fund5), and the Queer Studies Network, funded by the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). Should academic units of the University attempt to prevent one of their own colleagues – Todd – from speaking? Fortunately the transactivists decided to hold a rally in Broad Street rather than to intimidate people entering the meeting. The meeting proceeded without disruption. Todd emphasized the persistence of sex discrimination in the university sector. Matthews argued that we need to question the beliefs underlying gender ideology in the same way that earlier feminists exposed myths of their own time. Rosario Sanchez traced the transmogrification of Women’s Studies into Gender Studies and urged a re-turn to its roots. The speeches were followed by a lively question-and-answer session. What was said during the meeting would not surprise anyone who has encountered second-wave feminism.
Nevertheless, three of the four women on the platform have been targeted for harassment. As a founding sup-porter of LGB Alliance, a new group for homosexuals and bisexuals, Bailey received a torrent of abuse and even death threats online.8 Complaints were made to her Chambers, instigated by Gendered Intelligence – an organization which Oxford pays to train staff – and she is now under investigation. Rosario Sanchez has been bullied by students at her university ever since it was announced that she would chair a WPUK meeting in Bristol in 2018. She has been forced to run the gamut of masked protesters at meetings inside her university campus and has faced almost two years of threats by students to assault her at multiple events, both inside and outside her university.
Rosario Sanchez and Bailey’s experiences, incidentally, perfectly illustrates the perversity of today’s identity politics. We are exhorted to defer to oppressed groups, but when orthodoxy is challenged by a woman from the Dominican Republic and a black lesbian, then their dissident voices must be silenced. Todd has likewise faced a persistent campaign of harassment. Because the perpetrators are staff and students at Oxford, it should be of particular concern to readers. Trans Action Oxford’s subsequent statement (28 October) literally demands her sacking:
‘Todd refuses to grant trans women the same status as cisgender women. A person who is so openly transphobic should not be in the University’s employment, let alone in a teaching position where she is directly interacting with students … . We demand that it [the University] review its employment of Selina Todd.’
The authors –‘A collective of undergraduate and postgraduate students, and staff, of the University of Oxford’ – lack the courage to sign their names. The statement was retweeted by the Oxford Feminist Society. The Society also tweeted using the hashtag #FuckTerfs. The acronym stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, and and the associated Twitter traffic is often accompanied by threats of violence.
Ponder the paradox of anonymous ‘intersectional feminists’ hurling obscenities at a feminist scholar because she believes that women face discrimination on account of their sex. As Selina Todd has told me, abuse is not confined to social media. After the WPUK meeting, activists planned to disrupt her lecture to undergraduates, causing the History Faculty to ask the Proctors for security. The front row of the lecture theatre was occupied by several transactivists displaying slogans. Such overt intimidation goes far beyond the bounds of any normal academic disagreement or political debate. Moreover, there is reason to conclude that transactivists are targeting Todd as a woman. She and I share similar views on the subject of sex and gender; if anything, I have been more outspoken.
Although I have not altogether escaped criticism, I have not faced anything like the continual campaign of harassment which she has endured, which, she tells me, has included an official complaint to St Hilda’s – dismissed as without foundation – as well as relentless defamation on social media, for over a year. The University of Oxford deserves real praise for al-lowing the WPUK to hire its premises. (The only other British university to do so is Northumbria.) The Vice-Chancellor’s reply to Trans Action Oxford struck just the right balance: Oxford ‘prioritises protecting academic freedom and robust expression of opinion and debate, while not tolerating any form of unlawful discrimination or harassment.’ But, in my view, the University has not done enough to protect Todd from harassment.
It has neither defended her reputation as one of the leading scholars of women’s history with a long record of mentoring female students, nor refuted the defamatory claim that her presence is ‘directly detrimental’ to the ‘well-being and safety’ of trans students. Although the University has adopted robust principles on free speech (written by Professor Timothy Garton Ash and Lord Ken Macdonald), it evidently allows – as in the case of Trans Action Oxford – student groups and even academic units to violate those principles. The debate around sex and gender is inevitably heated because fundamental rights are really at stake.
Needless to say, members of the University have an absolute right to disagree vehemently with Todd and to repudiate her views. It should not be acceptable, however, to call for a colleague and teacher to be sacked for believing that sex matters.
I’m fairly new on Twitter but have already had the displeasure of witnessing the fury of faux-progressive backlash against feminism and feminists attempting to speak their mind in public places… in Canada. Canada?? The easy going, live and let live notions we like to believe in the more sensible regions of Canada seem to dissipate in our larger cities. Queer rights activists and trans activists have mounted a vigorous assault not on the arguments of gender critical feminists, but rather their character, the venues that host said feminists, and a rather hyperbolic set of straw assertions/mantras that serve as conversational dead ends/thought terminating cliches.
This is not the left that I grew up with, nor do I intend to ever associate with. These individuals seem to believe that their individualistic solutions to systemic social problems will somehow win the day. Not gonna happen.
The comparison between the regressive left and religious is worthy of examination. James Bloodworth makes the comparison in his essay on Unherd.
“But politics as religion invariably comes with a cost. There is, naturally, a constant hunt for heretics. Public denunciations followed by ‘cancellations’ are de rigueur. Rigid adherence to doctrine is celebrated, while those who err are pompously told that they are on the “wrong side of history”. Political spats focus on the moral character of a person rather than the content of their arguments. Public arguments in which, as Swift phrases it, “identity leftists spend a great deal of time expending venom… at fellow leftists with whom they have some minor disagreements” are ubiquitous on Twitter and other social media.
All of this takes the Left further into the echo chamber, away from the people it is supposed to represent. Attitudes which are held by the vast majority of Britons — that there should be some upper limit on immigration, that sex differences exist, that gender isn’t entirely a social construct — are enough to get a person ‘cancelled’ by today’s hobbyist Left. Moreover, the slippery equation of words — or even thoughts — with violence creates a censorious climate where activists feel justified in hounding people from public life completely.”
See the transactivists haranguing women and trying to disrupt two public (in Toronto and Vancouver respectively) gatherings that featured Meghan Murphy and other feminist speakers was solid proof for me of the parallel.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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