When is a person not a person?

Answer: when you’re under 16.

That is, at least, according to the ex-chair of UKCP in an October 2025 Telegraph article. He claims to have been unaware that the use of the word ‘person’ in the Memorandum of Understanding on conversion therapy included those under the age of 16.

So, how are children and people different, and what is being set up by and in us as therapists that lets one of the ‘top therapists in the UK’ (as posited by the Telegraph, at least) walk around for potentially their entire life, believing that children are somehow not people?

Dictionary.com gives its first definition of ‘child’ as “a person between birth and puberty or full growth” and we would be the first to acknowledge that the legal definition of ‘child’ has differed across ages and cultures, and situations. A 16-17 year old can get married or join the forces with parental permission, may have sex and procreate without parental permission, but may not smoke or vape, even with parental permission. A 16-17 can’t vote, but can have a job and pay taxes. These numbers have changed across time, and have not always had parity between genders (two people of different sexes could have sex legally at 16 since 1885. Before that it was 12, then 13. There was no consideration of an age of consent for sex between those identifying as men until 1967, when it was set at 21, and then lowered in 1994 to 18, and again to 16 in 2000. There was no equivalent for those identifying as women). None of this takes away from that child being a person, however. A person (also as defined by dictionary.com) is “a human being, whether an adult or child”, which also also suggests that the legal definition of person is “Law.,  a human being natural person or a group of human beings, a corporation, a partnership, an estate, or other legal entity artificial person, or juristic person recognized [sic] by law as having rights and duties”. Yep – even not actual people are legally people in some instances.

The main psychological theories in existence posit that there is a linear and progressive route to achieving stable and enduring gender certainty, and that children and adolescents are naturally in a state of flux. It is this state of flux that seems to create a line between children and adults (or children and people, depending on who you’re talking to). Once you’re an adult (or a ‘person’), you’re assumed to have ‘achieved’ a stable identity. There is a huge amount of double-think going on here. “Everyone changes”, but children don’t know who they are and might change (and therefore can’t be known as trans whilst they are in this place – however long it lasts). At the same time, “adults have a stable identity”, and that’s what makes an identity more trustworthy, but they come to therapy to explore (and potentially stay with) some hitherto un(der)explored aspect of their identity. That is what the jobs of so many therapists is; to work with adults with a stable identity, as they seek to change. That is our livelihood.

Which is it? Are adults and children both capable of fluidity of self? And if it’s not the notion of fluidity that creates the issue with children being seen as people with agency, what is it? 

The difference that seems to be held in popular areas of discussion is this: adults know, and children might think they know, but they do not (and cannot). And therefore by extension, until they know who they are, they cannot be a person. Adults however, may change as much as they wish, because we (who is this ‘we’?) know that they/we have a stable identity.

When working with children and young people, as when working with adults, we would do well to remember that we are not inside the heads of the person in front of us and therefore can not presume to know better than them what their experience is. Our methods of communication are partial at best. Sitting in a room with a counsellor and talking involves multiple steps. As a client, I have a thought/emotion process, and try to translate this into the 2D experience that is words that capture some of my experience. My therapist then receives my interpretation of my experience and interprets that through their own lens (even as some of us attempt to stay within the frame of reference of the other). The therapist then has their own internal process about my words, and then they offer me back their own 2D experience as it relates to my 2D experience of what is at least a 3D experience. As much as we try to be empathic, and sometimes we can do this much better than others, there are too many layers of interpretation happening here, to be right all the time. Whilst we have all been children, a crystal clear understanding of the processes we were going through at any moment in that childhood simply isn’t available to us in the present moment.

We are all human beings in flux, whatever age we are. Most of us who go to therapy go to explore some aspect of ourselves that we’d like to at least understand more fully, so that our deeper understanding might change something in our environment. No children know fully who they are yet. However, no adult does either. We allow adults not to know this, as long as their wondering about themselves don’t fall too far from an acceptable norm, or start from a marginalised place. Those who are marginalised know only too well what it is to have their personhood and agency stripped from them over and over again throughout history. We have a long history of ableism, racism and misogyny, in the same way that we have a long history of not allowing children agency. We are at risk of treating anyone who is not a white, cisgender heterosexual, able-bodied adult as someone incapable of agency, as somehow a ‘thing’, not a person, capable of wonder. And that results in their dehumanisation.

There is an argument that we should not affirm the right of children to be themselves because this somehow leads them down an ‘irreversible changes’ route – that by affirming them, we somehow cause children to become trans (read: delusional), which somehow forces them to get blockers, then hormones, then surgery. The first problem with this is that very little of this treatment is available for under 16 year olds, and so medical treatment such as hormone blockers (let alone what is often called ‘cross-sex hormones, or surgery) is simply not accessible to under 16s (and with NHS waiting lists in place, once a child moves on to the adult wait list it’s still going to be a significant time – the TransActual website shows that the longest wait time for hormones from referral is 8-10 years and in England and Wales the shortest waiting times for adult services are 2 years). Secondly, any therapist who tried to persuade a client to a cause of action would likely be working outside of their code of ethics (should they be registered with a membership body), because attempting to force anyone into anything in therapy is unethical.

We believe the recent article statement from the ex-chair of the UKCP makes clear that either there is a level of deliberate obtuseness, with the argument that he did not know that ‘children’ were included in the category of people (or, to put it another way, ‘didn’t know that children were human beings’), or that somehow, he does not see children as people, with agency, with the right to explore who they are. To suggest (or believe) that children are not people, is to exercise control over them without their consent. We are not ok with this.

Either way, we would suggest that the statement is ridiculous, and it seems clear to us that the definition of ‘people’ should never have needed special explication of just who was included in the category of ‘human’. Nor should children be used as pawns in a fight to withdraw one of the country’s main PSA-registered bodies from the Memorandum of Understanding on conversion therapy. Furthermore, children (and adults!) should be affirmed in their right to explore who they are, whether they come to a cis, or trans identity. At TACTT, we want people to be who they are at every age, and support full and open exploration of self that allows freely for all possible responses.