Still, he has “no regrets whatsoever, because although this has come as a personal cost to me, the stakes are simply far too high”. If anything, going public has only fortified his stance: he has been inundated with messages from anguished parents who, in one case, had found correspondence from Mermaids, the transgender charity, promising to send breast binders to their child behind their back. (Mermaids did not respond to requests for comment.) De-transitioners, who have taken puberty-blocking medication and been left infertile, or “permanently disfigured and scarred,” have also been in touch to show their support.
It seems mind-boggling that someone could be ejected from much-needed counselling work and therapy training for questioning how best to help vulnerable children; that Esses now spends his days fielding messages from peers who share his views, yet are too frightened to speak out. But the “‘trans’ topic is the issue of our time”, Esses now realises, one where an “affirmation mindset” has taken hold and any deviation results in career combustion like his own.
Part of the problem is in schools, where he has heard many cases where “children at a very young age are being taught that sex was assigned at birth, which is factually inaccurate”. Social media – in which people can find confirmation bias in corners of the internet – also plays a part. As, he thinks, does the language used by organisations such as Mermaids who tell children that “family isn’t blood” – “very, very alienating [and] isolating” phrasing designed to “drive young people further and further away” from loved ones who might challenge their point of view. If children are left to develop unencumbered, Esses says, “given time, given exploratory therapy, most of them settle into themselves and settle into their bodies”.
For adults who have exhausted all the options, namely exploratory therapy to get to the root cause of their discomfort, he believes gender reassignment surgery can be a reasonable last resort. But the general push for transitioning is regressive, he thinks: the product of a society that can only compute stereotypes, rather than nuanced understanding of the fact not every man or woman conforms to gender expectations, or needs to. It remains unclear to him why surgery has become a widely accepted solution to a mental disorder: “You wouldn’t treat anorexia with liposuction, so why are we treating gender dysphoria with medical transition?”
The Queen’s Speech came as a relief to Esses and his peers; legislation banning conversion therapy will not extend to gender identity, which would have “risked criminalising beneficial explorative therapy for vulnerable children with gender dysphoria and pushing children further down a one-way path towards medicalisation”.
He is hopeful that this is a positive sign of the direction of travel and that, by the time he starts a family, the issue will have become less fraught. “If things would stay as they are now, I would be fearful for my children,” he admits. That, like the rest of his future, still hangs in the balance.
An NSPCC spokesperson said: “Childline counsellors support children to explore their feelings in a non-directive way. They offer advice on how to cope with anxiety, how to discuss issues with trusted adults in their lives and signpost to available external support. We stand by our approach.
“Volunteers are the heart and soul of Childline and we value every second of support they offer children. But nothing is more important than the trust children have in the service.
“We respect people’s rights to hold different views, but volunteers can’t give the impression Childline endorses their personal campaigns. It’s vital that children know that Childline is a welcoming place for all young people.
“We believe this is a reasonable expectation. We discussed the situation at length with the volunteer, tried hard to find a solution, but unfortunately we couldn’t find a compromise. The conclusion we came to and the reasons for it were relayed to him via a telephone call and a letter. We took the concerns he raised about the Childline service seriously and fully investigated them but this had nothing to do with the discussions about his volunteering.”
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