the times | Wednesday December 2 2020 1GT 3
times
BETHANY CLARKE FOR THE TIMESHow long is it since you thought
about George Clooney?Weeks. Months. Hardly ever.
Is that a lie?
Yes. He’s one of my top three silver
foxes. What else do you think I think
about? Quantitative easing? Why do
you ask?Because he’s just revealed that he
cuts his own hair.A low-maintenance silver fox. Bliss.
What does he use?A Flowbee, marketed as “the
revolutionary haircutting system
you’ve come to love”. Can you guess
what this might be?Scissors?
No. It’s clippers with a vacuum
attached, so you pick up the hair as
you go along.Pity, I was hoping Amal took the
kitchen scissors to it. What attracted
George to this gadget?Well, it’s a gadget, first and
foremost, with lots of bits and
attachments, and it looks like
the black and yellow kit that
professional builders use. It also
promises to be “a refreshing
vacuum haircut”.I’ve had bad haircuts, and good
haircuts, and there was that time my
mother cut my fringe too short and
the school photographer arrived the
very next day to capture my shame
for all eternity, but I’ve never had a
refreshing haircut.Do you own a Flowbee?
No.
Well, there you are. Do we think
Amal uses it too?I would bet my life that Amal
is more of a £400-cut-and-blow-dry-
in-a-Mayfair-salon kind of girl.
Could George use his haircutting
thingummy to deal with his
beard too?What do you mean, “deal with”?
Shave it off. It offends me.
Isn’t George’s beard his business,
not yours?No.
As a matter of interest, if he’s one of
your top three silver foxes, who are
the other two?I’m afraid that’s classified. I could tell
you, but then I’d have to kill you.Hilary Rose
The lowdown
Clooney’s cut
hands and feet, my jawline, my short
stature. I started asking what makes
me a man. And I could never come up
with an answer. I will always be a
woman whatever changes in my body.
I was invested in a fantasy.” Moreover,
her other problems had not gone away.
Finally, “sick of being a medical
experiment”, she stopped taking
testosterone. While her periods
returned and she found herself able to
cry again, her deep voice and facial
hair are irreversible. Now happily
living with a female partner, she is
coming to terms with her double
mastectomy and “trying to accept my
body for what it is”. However, she grew
increasingly angry that online blogs
spoke of transition only in glowing
terms, promoting it to children, based,
she says, “on lies and sex stereotypes”.
In particular, she felt that “butch”
young lesbians like her were under
intense online pressure to become
trans men. “Gender is polarised: you
have to look a certain way. You feel
you have to fit in with expectations,
even if that means using experimental
drugs and surgery.”
Indeed, Bell is part of a 3,000 per
cent spike in girls being referred to
GIDS in the past decade, a
phenomenon noted in every western
nation from Australia to Finland. So
far, attempts to explain this have been
denounced by the LGBT groups as
bigotry. When Dr Lisa Littman of
Brown University analysed “rapid
onset gender dysphoria” among
teenage girls, often clusters of friends,
often same-sex attracted, with high
exposure to online trans forums, her
paper was removed from her college
website. James Caspian, a
psychotherapist, was told by Bath Spa
University that he could not research
a rise in trans people detransitioning
because it was “not politically correct”.
Yesterday, High Court judges
criticised GIDS for their own lack of
research data, in particular failing to
publish a 2011 study into the outcome
of children who took blockers. (Early
data so far released from that project
“noted that there was no overall
improvements in mood or
psychological wellbeing” among
recipients.) Judges also queried why
the sharp rise in natal girls and
children on the autistic spectrum has
not been analysed, saying it was
“surprising that such data was not
collated... given the young age of the
patient group, the experimental nature
of the treatment and the profound
impact that it has”.
Bell believes the LGBT community
should stop trying to shut down
academic inquiry and “accept that the
trans experience is not a monolith”,
that the reasons an adult male wishes
to transition may not be the same as
a legion of troubled 13-year-old girls
with other psychological issues.
She launched her legal case because
she felt she had made a “brash
decision as a teenager, as a lot of
teenagers do” and “couldn’t sit by
while so many others made the same
mistake”. She has since been contacted
by many other young women with
similar stories. She does not see
restrictions on prescribing puberty-
blocking drugs as an end in itself, but
the beginning of a move towards
in-depth psychological counselling for
gender-questioning young people.
“They need proper mental health
support. I just wish someone had
analysed my situation and the
problems I had without changing my
body. My body was fine.”‘What is your preferred name? Do Keira Bell
you want to transition?’ And a lot of
stereotype talk about whether I
played with boys’ toys, preferred boys’
clothes. There was no discussion
about my sexuality.”
After three further equally
superficial sessions, Bell was referred
to the endocrinology department,
which prescribed a year on puberty-
blocking drugs. “It was briefly
mentioned this might damage my
fertility. They said I could freeze my
eggs, but that isn’t available on the
NHS and I couldn’t afford to go
private. It seemed like a box-ticking
exercise. Besides, I was a teenager;
I couldn’t imagine wanting a baby.”
She was told that blockers were fully
reversible and would give her time to
decide whether she wanted to proceed
to male hormones.
That blockers are a harmless “pause
button” is highly contentious. The
NHS recently changed its advice from
stating they are “fully reversible” to
saying that “little is known about the
long-term side-effects” on a teenager’s
body or brain.
These GnRHa agonists release a
form of the human hormone
gonadotropin to stop testicles and
ovaries from producing sex hormones.
The most commonly used, Triptorelin,
is licensed to treat advanced prostate
cancer and endometriosis, “chemically
castrate” male sex offenders and halt
rare precocious puberty in children.
They have been increasingly used
“off-label” to treat child gender
dysphoria, and in 2010, under activist
pressure, GIDS reduced the age of
prescription from 15 to 10 years old. A
very young child who proceeds from
blockers to cross sex hormones — as
almost 100 per cent do — will be
infertile because sperm or eggs have
had no chance to develop.
For Bell, puberty blockers threw her
into menopause. “I couldn’t sleep
or think. I had hot flushes, night
sweats, brain fog, concentration issues.
My bones ached and I felt less
strong.” While in this supposed
thinking period before she committed
to her full transition, she received
no psychological counselling from
GIDS, just brief catch-up sessions.
“There was no discussion of my
future, whether I was on the right
path.” Nor were her underlying
problems — anxiety, depression,
social isolation and troubled home life
— ever examined.
After 12 months, GIDS prescribed
testosterone and Bell had her first
injection at her GP’s surgery. Her voice
deepened, facial hair began to grow
and she “passed” as male at sixth-form
college where no one knew her history.
By now she was living alone in a youth
hostel in Cambridgeshire, ever more
isolated. “I still felt out of place, but I
had something to latch on to. It felt
like my life was progressing. Transition
gave me a focus, took my mind off a
lot of other things.”
At 20, sick of the discomfort of still
binding her breasts, she underwent a
double mastectomy on the NHS. “I
wasn’t really briefed on how serious
and extreme this was,” she says. “I
found all my advice on how to heal
more quickly online. You were given
treatment, then they just left you to
cope.” Taking testosterone caused
painful vaginal atrophy, where the
vaginal walls thin and dry out.
“Doctors didn’t know what to do
about it. We are guinea pigs.”
Once her “top surgery” was
complete, and she decided not to
proceed with a more complex, risky
operation, which creates a non-
functional penis from skin stripped
from the forearm, Bell felt a sense of
anticlimax. “I started to nit-pick about
my appearance. I looked at my smallIt was
briefly
mentioned
that this
could
damage my
fertility
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