We Shall Overcome

A new era requires justice for detransitioners.

Keira Bell, the eloquent and elegant young woman interviewed by Graham Linehan at 2026’s Detrans Awareness Day conference in Washington DC, is a trailblazer. The court cases may now be coming thick and fast, but it was Keira who got the ball rolling. Her landmark litigation against the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the UK argued that young people are unable to give informed consent for the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. So, it was Keira who paved the way for the Fox Varian verdict of January 30 of this year, the first ruling to provide legal redress for so-called “gender affirming care” and, in the words of journalist Gerald Posner, “a shot across the bow of the paediatric gender industry”.

Posner rightly states that the industry has lost its “ethical bearings.” In hock to gender ideology, it reinterprets severe trauma in the lives of trans-identified young people, as well as the inevitable challenges of growing up, as reasons to perform irreversible medical interventions on healthy bodies that often enough turn people into lifelong patients. The original impulse here may be utopian: the belief that an ideal world, in which all is well for all people all of the time, is a feasible and desirable social justice objective. When the outcomes are botch jobs, mangled bodies, and societal dislocation, that impulse proves to be hellishly dystopian.

Many, or most, of us experience life as a sea of troubles at certain times in our lives. But if we are lucky, we will find the resilience in ourselves and/or ethically-grounded support and love from others who can help us through sometimes excruciatingly difficult patches. Keira didn’t have that support. She had a rough start in life that included sexual abuse and neglect. Aged 15, she decided to go down a path that would supposedly turn her into a boy. At 16 she was referred for puberty blockers by the Tavistock Gender Identity Services in London. A couple of years on blockers were followed by the move to testosterone at age 17. She was given a double mastectomy at age 20.

All of this was done to her. But now she’s the one doing the doing. She spoke out at the Detrans Awareness Day conference on March 12 in Washington D.C. And she keeps speaking out because, as she says, “I’m perpetually angered about this,” as well, importantly, about “so many other injustices in the world. This is just one of many.”

It’s wonderful to hear Keira talking about getting out and engaging with the world. Arguably, alongside Hannah Barnes book ‘Time to Think’, it was her momentous action against GIDS that led to the closure of the Tavistock Clinic. Her struggle to deal with her gender dysphoria (which medical intervention did nothing to alleviate) was in some ways more challenging than coping with the effects of testosterone on her body. But she’s past that point now and thinking about where she wants to go now that she is in charge of her life.

Keira also touches on some misconceptions around the notion of trauma (listen to the interview!) and her insights could not be more timely. They resonate with a broader debate that is just getting underway about institutional, societal and political responses to suffering, victimhood and, yes, trauma.

When both a Marxist like Catherine Liu and a conservative like Abigail Shrier critique the trauma industry, you know something must have gone awry.

In Catherine Liu’s words, the “trauma culture takes suffering at the individual level as a privileged site of political struggle, inheriting its mandate from the 1960s cliche: The personal is the political.” But in the process, this culture standardizes and mass markets individual suffering as a tightly scripted “trauma narrative”. In Liu’s view, a therapeutic language of suffering may have helped us find ways to articulate abuse, but it has also “delivered us into the arms of the market”. In the case of gender-distressed youth, although Liu doesn’t appear to have the spine to say this, the market in question is that of the ‘Gender-Industrial Complex’. Like Lucy Jonstone (a critic of “gender-affirming care” and the utopian project of the “perfectible individual”), Liu believes that we have to get out and, in her rather harsh criticism of navel-gazing, work together to change the world around us. And that means doing politics and focusing on policy responses to human suffering that are rooted in reality.

The road to hell

Abigail Shrier doesn’t mince her words at all. Therapists have played a huge role in the “gender catastrophe”. And we need to get back the assumption that “we can overcome.” It’s not about denying the traumas of the past. Keira’s suffering has been very real (as the very reticence of her narrative underscores). But trauma should not be “an essential part of your narrative”, Shrier says. Turning suffering into an organising principle of your life is a form of limiting determinism. And bad therapy—a well-meaning but misguided set of practices that prioritise emotional validation over resilience-building—” leans into feelings rather than into tasks”. Bad therapy rushes for diagnoses and medication and reinforces a sense of helplessness. In bad therapy (and bad psychiatry) there is no more normal. On the contrary, it pathologizes the normal at the same time as it trivialises the pathological. Which means that while institutions feed on suffering, the allocation of the resources they command is skewed away from those – like detransitioners – who really do need support.

It’s OK to be a quirky tomboy, as Keira was as a young girl, or an effeminate young boy, as Jonni Skinner was growing up. A culture that tells us otherwise has gone off the rails. As Mia Thomas says, if we truly want to support detransitioners, we will have to tackle the culture (education, publishing, television, museums) as well. And, as Abigail Shrier emphasises, the field of journalism is one of the most critical instances of institutional failure that needs to be addressed. Good journalism that opens up space for debate is essential in enabling us to get out there and thrash out what love in action—which is good policymaking—really looks like. Depending on whether we’re wearing left-wing glasses or see the world from a conservative perspective, we may disagree on where our problems come from and what is to be done about them. But in order to disagree, find solutions and deliver support, we have to be able to discuss freely, tell our stories and have them heard. Keira is doing just that. And, as she says herself, she’s getting better at it all the time.

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