In December 2020, the High Court of Justice in London ruled to place severe restrictions on the practice of prescribing puberty blockers (PBs) to gender dysphoric patients under the age of 18.

In this presentation, I use the Bell v. Tavistock court case to critically shed light on what I call the ‘suffering paradigm’ of the mainstream transgender rights movement: a particular politics of victimhood that makes the alleviation of individual suffering the key justification and moral basis for transgender rights and equality. I examine the unintended consequences of this narrative, showing that attempts to make the suffering of transgender youth intelligible and morally legitimate not only failed, but were turned against Tavistock in court.

Ellis Kokko (they/them) is a non-binary community activist and a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. They are working on an ethnographic history of the ‘suffering transgender subject’, examining how shifting ontologies of suffering have held a central role in making trans lives and selves intelligible. Their research centres around questions of victimhood, identity and the intangibility of trans futures. Alongside their PhD, they run a queer outdoor project, and are working towards becoming a counsellor.