The British doctor Graham Linehan, in an interview with the TV program BBC Newsnight, stated that there are “parallels” between scientific experiments that the Nazis carried out on children in concentration camps and medical treatments carried out on transgender children today.
“Children are basically being used to test puberty blockers,” said this week for the journalist SarahSmith, referring to the medication generally used for trans youth to delay puberty in order to age before deciding whether or not to undergo transition treatment.
No representatives of the trans community or doctors who have ever treated a trans person were on the show to share another point of view. The BBC told the website Pink News who invited the LGBT NGO Stonewall to send a representative, but the entity declined.
The journalist questioned the doctor's speech – and that was when he mentioned puberty blockers as an argument for his comparison.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Linehan responded. “But that’s basically what you said,” Smith countered.
In a statement, Helen Belcher, co-founder of Trans Media Watch, a UK-based NGO dedicated to improving media coverage of trans and intersex issues, responded: “The BBC did a reasonably good job of rebutting Linehan’s claims, but This does not improve the bias she has demonstrated in addressing trans issues in recent months.”
“Trans people are more 'talked about' than 'spoken to', and it's clear from Graham Linehan's comment that the BBC still doesn't have the basic knowledge to talk about what trans people's lives are like and how legislation affects us ”, he added.
