Seán Atkinson writes:
The people who write the slogans for mental health campaigns are never the ones left waiting a year and a half to speak to a counsellor.
“Talk to someone,” say the patronising posters smothering every bus stop. But after that length of waiting, talking starts to feel pointless.
When the appointment finally comes, it’s often an overworked, taxpayer-funded doctor counting down the minutes, handing out a prescription faster than a diagnosis. Not because they don’t care, but because there isn’t time to understand a life inside a system designed to process volume, not people.
The gap between condescending messaging and reality is hard to ignore. For most people, these campaigns don’t feel supportive — they feel like a reminder of what doesn’t exist. The people who design them live in a world where help is presumed to be available somewhere down the line. They don’t live with the consequences when it isn’t.
They are not the ones choosing between paying for counselling or putting food on the table. And that’s just mental health. They certainly aren’t the ones burying children who died waiting for basic surgery. They are not the ones ringing charities to ask for help paying for their da’s funeral, because the system broke him long before it buried him.
Every failed policy, every collapsed service, every rent hike, every imported belief system lands somewhere. And it lands most heavily on the working class. In that sense, every failure of governance becomes another quiet war.
So, why would gender be any different?
If you’ve been unlucky, you know the process. You see the advice on a bus stop. You decide to take it seriously. You get a GP appointment. You’re placed on a waiting list. Then you wait. And wait. When you finally sit down, there’s no room for context or curiosity. Just medication, because medication is faster than understanding. You ask for counselling and often receive a higher dose instead. The prescription sits in the pharmacy, uncollected, while you’re sent back to waiting.
That is how adult mental distress is handled. Many come out the other side double-dosed and humiliated. And when a system gets away with dismissing adult distress for long enough, it shouldn’t surprise us when children are eventually pulled into the same logic.
So when a child experiences discomfort with their body, long before they have the maturity to fully understand it, the system responds in the way it already knows.
Speed. Medication. Next. That’s what care looks like when understanding becomes unaffordable.
The only real difference is that this pathway is now labelled autonomy.
Gender distress hasn’t entered a system designed for care. It has entered a system already accustomed to shallow solutions. One that manages symptoms rather than understanding causes. A system more comfortable prescribing than asking difficult questions.
Whatever you believe about gender identity, we know that some children experience this distress. Real or not real, it deserves depth, patience, and the ability to cope with regret.
The kind of care that doesn’t exist for adults, nevermind children.
And these children deserve more than being processed through a system that cannot explain itself, support failure, or absorb uncertainty in organisations that already struggle to cope when things go wrong.
The only way to reach the root of distress is by asking questions. But questions carry risk. Curiosity creates uncertainty, and uncertainty, in a highly politicised environment, creates complaints. Whereas affirmation only creates paperwork, and the appearance of resolution.
This has become an incentive structure where moving forward is safe, and stopping to ask questions is not.
All we have is a one way system where forward movement is fast. Reversal is slow, unsupported, or denied altogether. When things go wrong, the system that rushed people through has no capacity to catch them on the way back.
Middle and upper-class families can often escape this with access to private care, second opinions, or overseas specialists. The working class cannot. They remain on public waiting lists, trapped in systems that don’t know how to help them and are often too afraid to try.
Where is the autonomy in that?
Much of the pro-puberty blockers argument assumes a level of choice that simply doesn’t exist for most people. Choice requires time, money, and energy. Hobbies are a privilege. Lifestyle politics is a privilege.
That’s easy to forget when middle-class activists are demanding boycotts from people rubbing coins together to buy an apple. Survival leaves little room for experimentation, and even less room for life-altering mistakes.
The people who are most committed to ideological purity are often the most protected from consequence. When decisions backfire, there is support, flexibility, and a way out. For everyone else, autonomy evaporates the minute something goes wrong.
That question remains unanswered: Who is there when the promised autonomy fails?
That lack of choice and autonomy lands hardest on the working class. Working class women rely heavily on public spaces, from bathrooms to changing rooms — places most of the celebrities waving flags will never have to use.
The same applies at work. Many women are expected to comply when HR departments instruct them on language or require them to share intimate spaces under new policies. Refusal is framed as a moral failing, not a question of rent, childcare, or keeping the lights on. And when you rely on that job, “just leave” isn’t an option.
It is easy to redesign shared spaces when you can always afford to walk away from them. If you complain, you risk your job. And if you lose your job, then what? The script never seems to fail for the people who didn’t have to live inside it.
New policies always land hardest on those least able to fight back. The people who can’t afford a lawyer, can’t risk unemployment, do not have a major platform, and can’t absorb another institutional failure.
In the end, this isn’t a battle between compassion and cruelty. It is a system that has repeatedly mistaken affirmation for understanding. The difference this time is how heavily ideological the mistake has become, and how predictably the cost will again be paid by the working class.
When understanding is replaced with affirmation, systems fail downward, and never toward the people who wrote the slogans.
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