I’ve clipped this little segment about the way one mother came to view her infant son as trans in stark opposition to the possibility that the little fellow instead might just be gay from a mrmenno video on YouTube, ‘Graham Norton’s Accountability Problem – A Gay Man’s response’. Menno’s a gender critical gay man who posts videos deeply critical of the trans ideology and some of the people pushing it. In his video, he criticises Graham Norton for stating in an interview on TV that J.K. Rowling has ‘problematic views’ and refusing to defend Graham Linehan, the writer of Father Ted, who has also been viciously attacked, vilified and cancelled because he is also a staunch opponent of the trans ideology. Menno is especially critical of Norton because of the way he has thrown other gay men and lesbians under the bus. The gay community as well as biological women has been hard hit by the trans ideology. Homosexuality has been redefined as same-gender attraction, so that gays and lesbians are attacked as transphobic if they do not accept as lovers people of the opposite sex, who identify as trans.
I don’t wish to start another argument over the trans issue. I’m very much aware that many of the great people who read this blog don’t share my views. And I also want to make clear that I don’t support abuse, assault or discrimination against anyone because of their sexuality or sexual presentation. But I think the video makes a very good point when it discusses how some parents seem to be using gender transition as a way of ‘curing’ their children of gayness. The segment I’ve clipped below contains a statement from an American woman that she did this to her little boy to stop him being gay, as he was playing with girl’s toys. Graham Linehan has said that he’s been told by whistle blowers at the now defunct Tavistock clinic that many of the children they saw were gay. They had been brought to the clinic for treatment by their extremely homophobic parents. If true, then it is, in my opinion, frightening and disgusting. I don’t doubt that there are people are genuinely trans, and who benefit from such therapy and surgery. But it should not be used, as it appears to be by some, as a form of gay conversion therapy.
This is why I’m putting this clip up. It’s a confession that she turned to this by the mother of a gay child. And this has a direct bearing on Labour’s LGBTQ+ policy. The party has said it wants to ban all gay and trans conversion therapy. This is extremely questionable, as the brutal methods of gay conversion therapy have been rightly illegal for a long time. But the ban on trans conversion therapy seems to be designed to stop alternative forms of treatment, such as psychiatric counselling, that may stop patients transitioning, for whom gender reassignment surgery may be inappropriate. And if homophobic parents are using it as a form of gay conversion therapy, then transitions of this sort should be banned just as the Labour party intends. To see the clip, go to:
I am very definitely not a fan of Toby Young. He’s a very right-wing Tory with nasty eugenicist views. I think he’s part of the Spectator crew and something of a sleazeball, as Hill Street Blues’ officer Mick Belcher would describe him. If memory serves me right, he was one of the people behind a proposed free university, which collapsed a few years ago. Tweezer appointed him to the body that’s supposed to represent Britain’s students, despite the fact that it’s been at least a couple of decades since he was one. He got into Private Eye a few years ago for attending a eugenics conference at one of the London universities. Along with him were members of various American far right groups, who believed that race really did define intelligence and Blacks were biologically less bright than the rest of us. They also weren’t in favour of the welfare state, for the old, old reason that it’s a waste a money supporting people who can’t fend for themselves. In other words, some of the people there could be reasonably described as Nazis.
And his attitude to women leaves much to be desired. A few years ago he managed to cause mass disgust on Twitter or one of the social media platforms by describing how he watched female MPs on TV, commenting on their busts. Back in the 90s he wrote a piece for GQ about how he had been a ‘lesbian for a day’. He then revealed in the article that he’d dressed up in drag and then decided to go trolling through New York’s lesbian bars looking for a snog. He had successfully passed himself off as gay woman in two of them, before he was discovered in a third and had to beat a hasty retreat. Or been thrown out. Whatever. This is the kind of antics many lesbians are complaining about from trans-identified men, or possibly straight men claiming to be trans. They object to clearly biological men demanding romance or sex from them because they claim to be trans. There have been transwomen giving presentations on ‘Breaking the cotton ceiling’, which means getting into lesbians’ cotton underwear. Graham Linehan, formerly the writer behind Father Ted and now an anti-Trans activist, has remarked that one of the lesbian dating sites is actually full of bearded men, who are about as feminine as he is, all claiming to be trans. Well, Tobes tried this trick decades ago. But I wouldn’t like to see him as any kind of trans pioneer.
But his Free Speech Union does have a point.
Young and the others set this up to protect people from persecution because of their views. These are mostly individuals, whose views or comments are deemed offensive because of racism, sexism, homophobia or anti-trans. He appeared on a video on GB News talking about the work the Free Speech Union had done defending two such individuals. One was a railway worker, who’d been sacked because of a comment he’d posted on social media. He lived in one of the towns up north with a large Muslim community. After the lockdown was lifted, he posted that it was a relief no longer having to live in an alcohol-free Muslim caliphate. Someone complained to the company, and he was sacked. The Free Speech Union, however, took up his case, and an industrial tribunal declared in his favour that he was a victim of unfair dismissal and awarded him damages. The second case was a Christian woman, who offended woke sensibilities by stating that the Christian ideal of marriage should be the heterosexual one of a man and woman. Now I’d say that this was perfectly correct and normal, and that holding such a view doesn’t mean that you automatically hate gays or people in same-sex marriages. I’m absolutely sure you can hold such a traditional view of marriage, while recognising that gays also have the right to marry and for their marriages to be respected. But this traditional view was too much for someone, and she suffered because of it.
Now I realise that many people do disagree with these views, and particularly with the railway worker’s comments. It is islamophobic. But that’s the point. For free speech to mean anything, it has to include offensive or unpleasant speech. Free speech that only permits approved speech whether by the authorities or the populace, is no such thing. I’m not a free speech absolutist. There have to be limits, which in my opinion includes holocaust denial, the promotion of paedophilia or which urges people to commit other crimes, like incitement to riot. I’d also include real incitement to racial hatred, though my fear is that such reasonable legislation has been broadened too far to include comments which someone simply finds offensive, rather than which genuinely threatens the safety of Blacks and other people of colour. The guy’s remark is offensive and tasteless but not, I think, really worth his job.
Young explained that the Union would like to pass legislation protecting people from being sacked for their views, if they expressed them as private individuals and not as work or representatives of a company or organisation. He also talked about getting the trade unions to back such legislation, considering that the trade unions were founded to protect workers talking about their companies’ pay and conditions. Well, it was a bit more than that. They were founded to fight for workers’ pay and conditions, but yes, opposing victimisation for one’s views is part of that.
He also proposed having a two-year limit on what could be used to attack someone from their web history. Here I definitely agree with him. There have been a number of cases where politicos, celebrities and ordinary mortals have been embroiled in scandals because of something they said online a few years ago, sometimes when they were much younger. Quite often it’s people, who’ve said something unpleasant or bigoted about people from ethnic minorities and gays, sometimes when they were very young. Private Eye has done this several times. Quite often they’ve printed pieces showing that whatever such a politician, industrialist or media figure thinks now, back in the day he or she had very different views. Sometimes very far back, like in the ’80s or ’90s. People change, and don’t necessarily hold the same views they had when they were in their teens or twenties.
But another reason I’m prepared to give such legislation my approval is because it might stop some of the persecution by the witch hunters. The stock in trade of persecutory groups like the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and David Collier and the GnasherJew troll farm is going through their targets’ internet history looking for anything they can misrepresent as anti-Semitism. They’ve done it to a lot of people, many of them Jews and firm opponents of anti-Semitism. They did it to the great Jackie Walker, a self-respecting Jew by faith and blood and a very committed anti-racist activist. Jackie had been discussing the involvement of Jewish financiers – who she explicitly stated were members of her own people – in the slave trade. This is historic fact, and Jackie, as a proper historian and academic, has produced an enormous amount of mainstream scholarship by respected and respectable historians to support it. She has also made the obvious point that these financiers were working for Christian, European kings and states, with whom the ultimate responsibility lies. Again, perfectly correct. But she left out a word, which allowed the CAAS to misrepresent her grotesquely as an anti-Semite. That, and the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recording some of her perfectly reasonable comments about commemorating other groups’ holocausts, like the slave trade, during a workshop on commemorating the Holocaust, has led to her being expelled from the Labour party and receiving the most horrific abuse.
Another victim of the witch hunters was a perfectly innocent Jewish lady in Devon. She was mentioned in an online film Mike and other Corbyn-supporting peeps appeared on promoting a documentary refuting the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. That film opened with a group of venerable rabbis in long beards, dark coats and broad-brimmed hats stating very clearly that Corbyn was no such thing. Many of the speakers, including Mike himself, were victims of the witch hunt and what looks to yours truly as gross libel. One of these wretched witch hunting groups had posted a map of the locations of anti-Semites, and this lady and her address were on it. As a result, she not only received abuse but her car was firebombed.
This is what is called ‘stochastic terrorism’.
This is the name given to the type of online activism when someone deliberately posts comments that will rile people up against a particular group or individual to the point where they may physically attack them. But the remarks that provoke and encourage the assault are carefully phrased so that the person making them can always disavow responsibility: ‘T’wasn’t anything I said, your honour. It’s nothing to do with me and I didn’t intend anything like it should happen.’ Except, of course, they did. As in my view was the case with this lady.
Toby Young is a Tory with deeply unpleasant views. But I do think the Free Speech Union has a point and deserves support.
Especially if it prevents malign witch hunters doxing innocent people, leading to attacks on them and their property.
As a Bristolian, I feel I have to add my fourpence worth about this controversy. One of the arenas of the culture war is over sex education in schools and especially sex education, with particular concern about the teaching or promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism. Parents and politicians are concerned about proper age-appropriate teaching of these subjects. The controversy seems to be particularly acute in America, where various, mostly right-leaning journos, activists and media pundits like Michael Walsh have criticised videos posted on TikTok of teachers coming out to young pupils and announcing that they’re gay, non-binary or trans. There have been instances where primary school children have been asked about which gender they identify with, as apart from their biological sex. One teacher proudly announced the ‘gender closet’ in which children can get changed into the clothing of the opposite sex when they want to keep it secret from their parents. There have been very sexually explicit books published for schools about gay and gender issues, containing the kind of imagery that once upon a time only used to be found in hard porn. And schools have also been told that, if a child trans, they should not inform his or her parents. As a result, there have been meetings of outraged parents confronting their local school boards in various towns and cities across the US. The Republican governor of Florida,, Ron de Santis, has just passed his so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ act, which forbids the teaching of anything about sex and sexuality, including heterosexuality, from ages 5 – 9. The Disney corporation and various LGBTQ+ employees have been particularly incensed by it, and have tried to mobilise opposition against the bill. This was in conjunction with a leaked video showing some of its top brass saying that they want half of all their characters to come from ethnic minorities or the gay community. As a result, right-wing Republicans like Walsh are calling for an end to Disney’s autonomy in the state and its tax exemption. I have to say that this shows a somewhat skewed morality. As a massively profitable global enterprise, Disney should pay its fair whack of tax like the rest of us proles. And especially because conditions for its workers in China are so dire that they’ve had to install suicide nets in their factories to stop the wage slaves toiling over their merchandise from killing themselves.
The Tobacco Factory, one of Bristol’s many theatres, put its collective feet firmly into this mire of controversy last week when they announced they were hosting ‘A Small Family Sex Show’ by theatre company ThisEgg. The show was described as woke, Queer and feminist, ,and intended to teach children about sex, using personal experiences, covering sexual orientation, gender identity, boundaries and so on. The show was described as suitable for children of five upwards, and included a section where the performers were free to take their clothes to the extent they felt comfortable. This could be total nudity, or else the removal of bottoms but not underwear, or even just simply staying clothed. The content included teaching children about masturbation, touching as well as other, much more dubious and extreme practices. Quiet-voiced Benjamin Boyce, an American YouTuber who discusses topics like gender identity, went through the description of the show’s contents on their website. This also included various explicit drawings. It was a weird mixture of sex with information about theatre, such as pointing out that the areas to each side of the stage that are hidden from the audience are called the wings. It also promised to teach children about White privilege and supremacy. In the video introducing the show, it’s producers introduce themselves with their pronouns and a description of their race, complexion, hair colour and so on. They seem to have been White, and Boyce wondered why they thought such descriptions were necessary when everyone could see what they were like. But it was the sexual subjects they show intended to teach which naturally attracted Boyce’s astonishment and disapproval. Again and again he wondered aloud how it wasn’t grooming. And others wondered too, on both sides of the Atlantic, with many being very firmly convinced it was.
Karen Davis, a gender critical Black American YouTuber, covered it on her channel. She was concerned that it was aimed at a time when children were only just learning to differentiate between fiction and reality, and that you could not like people while still being civil to them. She was also concerned that it would break down barriers about sex between children and adults, barriers that children naturally have for very good reasons. She was concerned that it was teaching kids not to believe their own eyes and feelings about whether an adult presented a danger, and would so make them vulnerable to predators. Davis has very strong and uncompromising views on the trans issue and she goes further in her opposition than some other gender critical folks. But in this instance her views seem to be very well grounded. She frequently cites the medical and academic literature to support her opinions, which are also informed by her work as a special needs teacher for children. She has also previously worked in centres for people with mental health issues. She knows whereof she speaks. And one of her concerns was about the theatre companies name. ‘Egg’ apparently is trans slang for someone on the verge of being trans, who needs to be ‘hatched’. I wondered if the name wasn’t inspired by a cult BBC show about a group of graduates living in London called This Life, one of whose characters had the monicker ‘Egg’. The show claimed it had the support of one of the organisations charged with protecting children, but a glance at that organisation’s website – it might have been the NSPCC – showed that the show was in conflict with the organisation. This said on their website that one of the signs that a child was being abused or near to a child who was, was sexuality explicit talk.
There have been any number of people on YouTube in Britain and America tearing into the show. Meesh Makeida, a Black British mother, covered it in one of her videos and made it very plain that she definitely would not take her five year old to it. Karen Davis in her video about it compared it to the real, grubby sex shows for adults. Unfortunately, these have been about in my city. The city council voted a few months ago to shut down the, er, ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. And the tone of Park Street in Clifton went up when the strip clubs there closed down in the 1980s.
A large number of Bristol’s citizens also made their opposition to the show very plain. There was a petition against it, which garnered 38,000 signatures. There were also threats of death and violence against the theatre and ThisEgg. This resulted in the show’s cancellation. The producers have claimed that they were forced to pull the show due to the threats, and that these came from a small minority of extremists.
I don’t agree with making death threats, and sincerely hope that those sent did come from a small minority. But the 38,000 signatures on the petition definitely don’t come from a small number of people. I don’t know how many people were actually aware of the show’s existence – I haven’t seen it mentioned on the local news. But offhand I can’t think of anyone who would be happy at such a show being performed in front of children and especially not five year olds.
And grooming is a real and legitimate issue with this play. It appears to be informed by Queer Theory. This, in the view of scholars and critics like James Lindsay, explicitly wishes to break down the barriers between adults and children in matters of sexuality and sexual identity. It’s based on the theories of Foucault, a postmodern philosopher and paedophile. Foucault and other intellectuals tried to get the age of consent reduced to 12 or there about in France in the 1970s, and Foucault himself used to go to North Africa to take advantage of the prostituted boys. One of the issues here is that the gay rights movement in its early stages included many paedophiles and civil rights activists who mistakenly believed that it should be legalised. The gay movement in Britain began making headway when the gay organisations purged the paedophiles from their ranks and made it very plain that gay very definitely did not equal paedo. There are thus fears that the paedophiles are trying to come back in through Queer Theory and the kind of sex education that it produces.
Graham Linehan, the writer of Father Ted, Big Train and the IT Crowd and a very firm opponent of the trans ideology, also discussed the play with American gender critical feminist Kara Dansky. I think Linners believed that ThisEgg were genuine in their concern that children received proper information about sex, just misguided. Dansky, on the other hand, suggested that the company really may have been deliberately grooming children. I hope not. They seemed sincere, but terribly, destructively wrong in my opinion.
When the news that the show was being staged a week ago, some of the commenters on various videos had a dig at Bristol. The city’s terribly ‘woke’, you see, and somehow it’s all the fault of the University. Well, certain parts of the city are very left-wing. People joke about the ‘People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’, for example. Other parts are more moderate or Conservative. And the various initiatives taken by Bristol University, such as lowering admissions for Black and Asian applicants in order to encourage more of them to apply don’t come from a long history of left-wing activism. They seem to be initiated in order to dispel criticism that the university is too elitist and White. But of course, there are left-wing lecturers there, just as there are Tories and others, who keep their political views quiet.
As for theatre in Bristol general, the city has a number of excellent venues. The Hippodrome tends to stage West End musicals like Cats, Return to the Forbidden Planet and even, every so often, the Rocky Horror Show. The Theatre Royal in King Street is one of the oldest in the country, and has produced many of this great nation’s leading thesps. It’s had everything from one man shows by Michael Bentine and John Mortimer, to performances of Into the West, from the film starring Ron Moody as a villain. It also staged more challenging performances about the Vietnam War and its legacy. Another theatre venue, Quaker’s Friars, has staged great plays, one of which was by one of the great 18th century French playwrights, as well as a production of the Hollywood classic Key Largo. And before it decided to put on A Small Family Sex Show, the Tobacco Factory had also put on several excellent plays, including puppet shows for children.
I think it’s excellent that the show has been cancelled, but I’m also acutely aware that children do need proper sex education. There was a time when it was not taught in school, and so children were really ignorant about their bodies, the changes of adolescence and reproduction. We should very definitely not go back there, whatever opposition there is to it by right-wingers like Peter Hitchens.
I’m also not entirely convinced that there’s been this controversy about it just when Bristol is facing a referendum over the elected mayor. At the moment it’s Marvin Rees for Labour. Now the mayor and city council generally have had nothing to do with the show, and no-one has said they have. But I’m afraid that the controversy over the play and the constant statements by the right about it being the product of the ‘woke’ left will lead some people to mistakenly connect it to Labour.
Bristol’s a great city, with great theatre. A Small Family Sex Show isn’t one of them, and shouldn’t have been booked.
Children do need proper sex education, given at suitable ages and using appropriate material. They cannot be left ignorant, but should not be exposed to material that is too explicit either. Especially when there is the danger that real abusers could use to approach children, no matter how well-intentioned the people behind such material are.
Nadine Dorries’ appalling decision to press on with the government’s plans to sell off Channel 4 has been widely condemned. I put up a piece about it yesterday. It has nothing to do with saving anyone any money, but is merely yet another Tory assault on public service television in the service of media monopolists like Rupert Murdoch. It is part of their ongoing campaign to enforce a uniformity of right-wing opinion across the media, until all you hear is just Tory propaganda. As if that isn’t already mostly the case.
I got this internet petition from the pro-NHS, pro-nationalisation organisation We Own It against the privatisation today. I’ve signed it. If you feel the same about the issue, please do so as well.
‘Dear David,
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has finally announced her outrageous plan to sell off Channel 4.
Channel 4 is ours, and it doesn’t cost us a penny. It produces shows and films that bring us together – like Slumdog Millionaire, Father Ted, It’s A Sin. It reinvests profits into nurturing new talent, working with small businesses and providing jobs across the UK.
That’s why an overwhelming 82% of the public don’t want Channel 4 to be privatised. Sign the petition to tell Nadine Dorries to get her hands off Channel 4 now!
Nadine Dorries says that “government ownership is holding Channel 4 back”. This is just as false as when she said “Channel 4 is in receipt of public money”.
Channel 4 is entirely funded through advertising and is highly successful financially, reinvesting profits into developing programmes and supporting emerging talent.
Any plans to privatise the broadcaster have to go through Parliament – but thanks to you taking action to get this issue on the radar, Tory MPs are already worried.
In response to thousands of your emails, a group of Conservative MPs came out against their own party and called for the government to leave Channel 4 alone.
You have created the conditions for the fight back over the past months. You contributed to the HUGE 60,000 responses to the government consultation. 12,600 of you emailed your MP, resulting in Conservative MPs using your reasons against the sell off in their public letter to Boris Johnson.
Now is the time to show just how many of us back Channel 4.
A range of voices – from senior Conservative politicians to celebrities – have come out against the privatisation.
Julian Knight MP, Conservative Chair of the Parliamentary Culture Committee, publicly said that privatising the channel would be a “big risk”, and even pointed out that this announcement seemed like “revenge” for news coverage that has been critical of the Prime Minister.
Kirstie Allsopp has said that if these plans go ahead, “news & current affairs, and cutting edge dramas are likely to be thinned out. Profit will be king and the passion & inclusion of Channel 4 will be lost.”
Sir David Attenborough has backed an open letter warning ministers to stop “these short-sighted political and financial attacks”.
Business leaders, politicians, and unlikely allies are coming out against this sale alongside unions, actors and workers in the cultural sector. But it’s your voice, as the 82% of the public, that has the power to really swing this.
Every additional voice has an impact – add yours by signing the petition now.
We know that we need Channel 4 for the future, as part of shaping a more equal UK: providing opportunities outside of London, holding power to account, and platforming new voices.
Thank you for standing up for our public broadcaster in its time of need, for all of us.
In the words of We Own It supporter, Jon: “Channel 4 produces brilliant work, excellent documentaries and independent news – what’s not to like?”
Solidarity,
Cat, Zana, Jack, Johnbosco, Alice, Matthew, Tom – The We Own It team’
As I’ve said before, I’ve mixed feelings about the imminent demise of GB News. It is a right-wing news network, deliberately founded to provide an ‘objective’ alternative to the ‘wet, woke’, BBC with Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunset Times, Economist and head of the board that runs the increasingly far-right Spectator, as its main man. Well, the channel has failed to attract viewers, advertisers have been put off by what they see as its racist bias, and its main broadcaster now is former chief of the Brexit party, Nigel Farage. Neil has jumped ship like the proverbial rats and it’s highly debatable how long the channel’s investors will put up with it before they finally pull the plug. Plus Rupert Murdoch is planning his own rival in the shape of TVTalk. This won’t have the financial problems of GB News, because it’s going to be financed through subsidies from the other parts of Murdoch’s empire of filth. Which means that Britain could be getting a version of Fox News, a channel so untrustworthy and which tells so many lies that researchers found that people who took no news at all were better informed that viewers of Fox. Salvador Dali once said that he was intent on cretinizing the public. Dali was immensely talented, but greedy, treacherous, perverted and a supporter of General Franco. He died some time in the late ’70s or ’80s. But his mission to turn the west into a region of dribbling morons is being carried on by Dirty Rupe.
On the other hand, GB News does provide a valuable service by inviting guests to speak, who have been blogged or silenced by the other channels and media for their controversial views. These include critics of postmodernism, including Critical Race Theory and the transgender ideology like Helen Pluckrose. Another critic of the transgender ideology is Graham Linehan, the writer of such comedy greats as Father Ted, the IT Crowd, Big Train and co-creator of Black Books. In this interview with Andrew Doyle on GB News’ Free Speech Nation, Linehan talks about his activism challenging the transgender movement. He’s motivated by fear and outrage at the way he feels vulnerable people, especially girls and young women, are being misled into believing themselves to be transgender and the immense harm that such needless transitioning is doing to their bodies and minds. The puberty blockers not only halt the transition to physical adolescence but there is also evidence that it stops the crucial brain development that comes with it. The people given these drugs therefore stay locked in an emotional childhood. The double mastectomies performed on transitioning women leave the patient with no sensation in their chests. The use of male sex hormones causes the womb to atrophy and adhere to other organs, so that the transmen given these hormones often have to have hysterectomies in their 20s. He argues that there is no respectable science backing up the claims of the transgender movement, and that what science there that supports some of their claims comes from very small studies, and so is scientifically highly debatable.
Linehan is also concerned about the way sexually predatory men may claim to be transwomen in order to get into a position to abuse women. One example of this is the recent Wi spa incident, where a Black woman complained about a naked man in the women’s area. Although this was dismissed by pro-transgender activists as a hoax, further witnesses have come forward. And the perpetrator himself had multiple convictions for indecent exposure as well as burglary. He also talks about the way the Girl Guides have extensive, rigorous rules protecting girls and women if men go away with them, but these rules are somehow relaxed with transwomen, as if all such people were equally safe and nice. He draws a comparison between the paedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. For nearly a century, the priesthood were a protected caste. As a result, paedophiles could join the Roman Catholic clergy confident that they would be protect from prosecution. Transwomen in his view now form a similarly protected class who are somehow held to be immune from any wrongdoing.
Linehan has, unsurprisingly, been accused of transphobia, which he denies. He states that there are transpeople who support him, and says he has met more transpeople through his activism than possibly his critics. He certainly does have his supporters in the trans community, several of whom have appeared on his YouTube channel, The Mess We’re In. As for the position that transwomen aren’t women, he points out that there are transwomen like Debbie Hayden and Blair White who don’t describe themselves as women. He believes that in the coming years we will see a growth in the number of detransitioners, former transpeople who have found that transitioning has not cured their problems with gender identity and expression.
Linehan also views the trans movement as acting against gay people, particularly lesbians. He has spoken about Pride rallies, where much has been said about trans people, but lesbian women aren’t mentioned. He views the trans ideology as a new kind of conversion therapy designed to stop children from being gay. In his view, homophobic parents are putting gender non-conforming children – kids who play or adopt the dress of the opposite sex – forward as transgender out of the fear that they may be gay. They can’t handle that, and it’s easier for them to accept that they are really people of the opposite sex stuck in the wrong body. He’s particularly convinced of this since he heard a joke going round the Tavistock clinic, one of the main transgender clinic, that if they continue transitioning people, soon there won’t be any lesbians left. He also talks about how many gay people are worried about the way the main gay organisations, such as Stonewall, have thrown all their weight behind the trans ideology. They are afraid that when the transgender craze finally breaks and the bankruptcy of the ideology is finally revealed, then ordinary gay people will suffer because of the strong support organisations like Stonewall gave it.
He also talks about the attempts trans rights activists make to silence their opponents. He describes the abuse gender critical feminists receive and the refusal of TRAs to engage in any kind of dialogue with them. He states that a group of gender critical peeps wrote a letter to one of the papers requesting their opponents to tone the abuse down a bit. Not only was this polite request refused, but one of the signatories, a gay man, suffered attempts to wreck his career simply for signing the letter. James Dreyfus, a gay actor, who has appeared in the comedy programmes The Thin Blue Line and Gimme, Gimme, has also suffered from this. Dreyfus has played the Master in one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays. Yet his gender critical stance has resulted him being airbrushed out of a list of actors who have played the Doctor’s arch-enemy. Trans Rights Activists refuse to appear on programmes or platforms with people like Linehan, stating that they will only debate the issue with trans people. But there’s silence from them when transpeople come forward, who oppose the ideology. They don’t want to debate them either. Linehan has said that the reason one very prominent feminist academic has refused to debate the issue on television is because this woman would be unable to credibly explain how Eddie Izzard is a woman in the same way as people’s mothers.
And Linehan has also suffered for his gender critical feminist views. His own career is comparatively safe, though he mentions that there is one episode of the IT Crowd that the broadcasters tried to censor. This was about one of the characters falling in love with a transwoman. It’s held to be transphobic, but he points out that the joke is actually that the transwoman, although identifying as female, still behaves like a man. Which makes her the ideal partner for the other character, who is quite blokey. His wife, however, suffered far more from attempts to wreck her career, simply because she was married to him.
I realise that this is a very, very, emotive and controversial position, but I strongly believe critics of the transgender movement like Linehan, Kellie-Jay Minshull and others, absolutely deserve to be heard. What should matter in a debate like this is reasoned debate, backed by scientific fact. But I don’t see this coming from the Trans Rights Activists, many of whom, Linehan alleges, really aren’t transgender. Instead I just see abuse, including horrific death threats and violence. For examples of this, go to the Women Are Human site.
I am aware that there are supporters of the new transgender ideology who read this site. I appreciate their fears and their views, and really don’t want them to feel excluded or vulnerable. I repeat: I don’t want to see anyone persecuted, discriminated against or victimised because of their sexuality or sexual orientation. I appreciate that there are people for whom transitioning to the opposite sex may be the best treatment for their condition. The statistics for the number of transpeople murdered in Britain is actually very low – perhaps about three in the last decade or so. It’s far lower than the murders of other demographic groups. But I do understand transpeople’s fears of violence against them. Way back in the 1990s there was a small press magazine for transpeople, Aeon: The Magazine of Transkind. This covered issues such as anti-trans violence. I definitely do not, in any way, support such violence against anyone because of their gender presentationor identification. I am also acutely aware that transgender people are definitely not all paedophiles, rapists or sexual predators, and don’t want to see them tarred as such because of those that are.
But there are real issues surrounding women’s safety, their ability to participate in women’s sports against transwomen, who may have a physical advantage from their former male physique and development. I think there is a problem with psychologically vulnerable young people, particularly girls, being misdiagnosed and put on the track for transition when it is medically inappropriate. One of the other issues Linehan and the gender critical feminists raise is that there are all kinds of medical complications with gender reassignment. It is difficult, painful and expensive, and can lead to poor health for the rest of the life of the transman or -woman. They feel that people with gender dysphoria – the medical term for dissatisfaction with one’s gender identity – are being miss-sold gender reassignment surgery as a cure for this problem when it may not. There are problems with the TRA claim that without surgery, trans-identified people will commit surgery. However, some transpeople have committed surgery, possibly because they have found out that it is not a cure for their problems.
This has certainly happened. Years ago there was a report in the papers about the discovery of the body, police had initially believed, of a young woman. Forensic investigation, however, revealed that this individual was a transwoman. From what I remember of the case, she had drowned herself, leaving a suicide note that read that she now regretted transitioning and wished she could turn back. It’s a tragic case, and I hope whatever side of the debate you’re on, we all agree that everything should be done to stop transpeople, or anyone else, taking their lifefor whatever reason.
These are vital issues, but any criticism of the trans ideology is being blocked and silenced. North of the border the Maria Miller, a gender critical feminist, is being prosecuted for hate speech because she put up stickers saying ‘Scottish women won’t wheesht’ – a Scots term meaning ‘shut up’ or ‘be silent’ – and a looped ribbon which her opponents claim is a noose. The SNP have also gone further and banned demonstrations outside the Scots parliament after the mass demonstration by Scots women and their male supporters a week or so ago. Every attempt is being made to silence gender critical people through the accusations that they are hateful and transphobic. The LGB Alliance, which believes trans is a separate issue and the gay organisations should return to fighting for gay rights, has been accused of being a hate group.
Horrendous as GB News is, I believe it is performing a vital service by allowing people like Helen Pluckrose and Graham Linehan to speak. This is a service that should be done by the BBC as the country’s public service broadcaster. But it isn’t. Linehan has pointed out that the Corporation backs the trans ideology to the extent that one of its children’s programmes presented a White, heterosexual couple as a pair of lesbians on the grounds that the male partner was trans-identified. He has become so disgusted with the Beeb that he has joined the right-wingers demanding the cancellation of the license fee. As for himself, he and Doyle have crossed swords in the past, though the discussion on here is entirely amicable. Linehan states that the debate is tribal, and that before he got involved in it he believed that everyone on the right really was evil. But after coming into contact with them, he finds that they are not. It’s just a different view of the world. Well, in the case of some Tories, that’s definitely the case. But I still believe that Therese Coffey, Esther McVey, Iain Duncan Smith and their ilk, who have been persecuting the disabled, the unemployed and the poor are genuinely evil, and don’t simply have a different opinion. Not with the number of people their policies have killed.
Controversial as they are, programmes and videos like this are an argument in favour of GB News. I’ve no time for the standard media rhetoric about how neoliberalism is absolutely correct and anyone challenging it, like Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, are evil Trotskyites and communists. That’s all over the media, including supposedly left-wing papers like the Groan and the Mirror. But the culture war issues cut across political boundaries and are the best argument for the channel’s continuation. But it’s these issues that are alienating the younger staff and causing them to leave.
I’m no fan of GB News nor the horrendous Farage and Brillo. I don’t think it’s remotely a loss to British broadcasting that the man who has no problems with Taki writing horrendous anti-Semitic screeds and praises the neo-Nazi Greek Golden Dawn in the pages of the Spectator. But I am afraid that dissenting voices that genuinely need to be heard will be left without a platform when it goes.
And I am very much afraid of Dirty Rupe’s planned replacement.
As Zelo Street and others have pointed out, GB News appears to be heading down the tubes fast. Andrew Neil has departed and viewing figures continue to be dire, despite the broadcaster taking on Nigel Farage. They have tried and failed to entice Piers Morgan to join them, and are considering taking on Ann Widdecombe and Martin Daubney, both from the Brexit party, and the Conservative blogger Mahyar Tousi. The Street points out this is hardly likely to inspire more people to start watching, as Widdecombe is a joke and Daubney ‘a dishonest whacko’. The channel also seems to be losing younger staff, who wanted it to be a mainstream channel with a right-wing slant not the British equivalent of Faux News. These employees are particularly upset that GB News has been discussing culture war topics. I have to say that I’m in two minds about the channel’s demise. I’m not particularly unhappy that the right-wing alternative to the ‘woke, wet’ BBC looks like it’s in terminal decline. On the other hand, it is providing a valuable service by tackling the culture war and issues like Critical Race Theory and the trans ideology. At the moment its one of the very few people willing to broadcast interviews with Graham Linehan, the writer of Father Ted, the IT Crowd, Big Train and co-creator of Black Books, and allow him to explain why the trans ideology is so dangerous and harmful. Much of the media is determined to deny him and other gender critical activists space, or smear them as ‘TERFS’ and transphobes. It similarly appears to be one of the few British broadcasters willing to interview Helen Pluckrose, a feminist scholar who is a bitter critic of Postmodern ideologies like Queer Theory, which underpins the trans movement, and Critical Race Theory. Yesterday I found this video of an interview of Pluckrose by presenter Andrew Doyle.
Pluckrose’s background is in medieval literature. She first became alerted to the damage Postmodernism was doing to genuine academic research and scholarship when she was studying 14th century women’s religious writing. She was interested in how medieval women used the Christian narrative to empower themselves. However, her approach conflicted with that of her supervisors, who wished to see her pursue a postmodern approach to the topic. She also encountered the same opposition when trying to study Shakespeare. There is considerable interest amongst some academics in searching the Bard for racism. But she points out that the 17th century was the period when colour racism was only just emerging. Shakespeare, whom she considers to have been a Humanist with Roman Catholic elements, was behind the times. He belonged to an age when religion was still more important than race. She got into particular trouble when discussing why Desdemona was attracted to Othello. She believes it was because the Moor was a hero. She was, however, told that she couldn’t say that, because it would offend certain Black religious communities in America. So much for trying to see the past on its own terms.
As Pluckrose describes it, Postmodernism is a form of philosophy which rejects empirical science and debate in favour of viewing the world through the use of language. There is no objective truth, and what is considered knowledge is socially constructed, expressing and maintaining power relationships. Hence western science is fundamentally about maintaining the social status of elite White men. It’s based on the philosophy of Foucault, although she states that Foucault would not have been a fan of what his successors have made of his theories. She discusses intersectionality, and how it sees power in terms of the privileged relationships between distinct groups. Intersectional postmodernists, for example, would see her as possessing heterosexual privilege against Doyle, who I presume is gay. At the same Doyle has male privilege over her. Critical Race Theory developed from legal scholarship and sees race relations through the same lens. As I understand it, it sees White people as privileged and racist, without exception. These new forms of Postmodernism emerged with a new generation of activist scholars in the 1980s.
She describes the real intolerance at the heart of Critical Race Theorists like Robin di Angelo and Ibrahim X. Kehindi. These two see the world purely in black and white terms. You’re either racist or anti-racist. Anti-racist means you agree with them. If you’re race neutral, you’re still racist. You’re also racist if you disagree with them. And from what I heard here, some of their doctrines seem designed to cause racism rather than cure it. In one of her wretched books, for example, di Angelo claims that White people being nice to Blacks is also a form of racism. Doyle looks astonished and says, ‘She can’t mean we must be…’ He is met with a silent, rueful nod from Pluckrose. Pluckrose goes on to describe how, when she was reading the book in which di Angelo argues this nonsense, she found herself checking herself when she met a Black woman and her little girl out walking. The little girl was lovely, and so Pluckrose smiled at her. She then started worrying about that simple gesture of ordinary humanity in case she was perpetuating racism. I realise Black people have complained about being patronised by Whites expressing friendship, but attitudes like di Angelo’s make genuine good relations between people of different races extremely difficult.
At the same time, the Postmodernists’ concern with language also causes difficulty. They don’t regard something as existing before a word was invented to describe it. Thus, despite the existence of bisexuality in ancient Greece, they don’t believe homosexuals existed until the word was coined sometime in the 19th or 20th centuries. They are also extremely fragile and do everything they can to silence their critics rather than engage with them, and react with extreme rage to any criticism. Pluckrose states that it is because they really do believe that counterarguments are a form of violence comparable to physical attack. Doyle states that he has had personal experience of this. When he was debating someone from one of the Postmodernist groups they burst into tears, complaining that by advancing his arguments Doyle somehow wished to harm them.
Pluckrose herself has founded an organisation to help people, who have become victims of this nonsense, and describes how it can be combated. She describes herself as a liberal, who wishes issues to be settled by the Enlightenment methods of science and rational debate. She wants Postmodernists to engage with liberals, who believe in individualism, science and universalism, as well as Marxists. But they won’t. She’d like there to be a conversation between trans activists and gender critical feminists, but this isn’t happening. While she’s not aligned with the extremists on either side, she is more worried about the gender critical feminists as they are being denied their right to speak. She also talks about the fundamental disagreement between the two groups. Gender critical feminists see everything as determined by biological sex. The trans activists stress gender, socially constructed sexual identity. Thus the two aren’t talking about the same thing when it comes to debate, hence part of the failure to find a common ground for agreement. When it comes to racism, she advises her viewers on the way to reply to any communications from HR departments about being put on anti-racist courses. She believes that one of the reasons Critical Race Theory has made such deep inroads is because most people genuinely don’t want to be, or to be seen to be, racist. At the same time, anti-racist activists have become more intolerant because the legislation designed to combat racism is unable to remove other forms of racism. She genuinely wants to see racism and other forms of bigotry fought, and objects to Critical Race Theory and Postmodernism because it is actually extremely poor at doing so. She advises her viewers that if they get any messages about anti-racism training from their employer, they are to reply congratulating them about doing something to tackle racism. However, they are to follow this up with other messages asking for assurances that this training will not require Whites and Blacks to feel a particularly way. In the case of Whites, this is guilt for their institutional privilege and racism, and in the case of Blacks, to feel they are victims of White privilege and racism.
This is important, as the BBC, NHS, Oxfam and various big companies have all bought into Critical Race Theory, while it also seems supported by left-wing newspapers like the Guardian. Oxfam and the NHS have demanded their workers fill questionnaires about how they see White privilege, for example. And some of those promoting Critical Race Theory could themselves be seen as racist. They discuss Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of colonial and post-colonial literature at Oxbridge. Gopal talks much about ‘Whiteness’, but its clear that sometimes she’s not talking about ‘Whiteness’ but about White people. A few months ago she tweeted that ‘White lives have no value’ adding underneath ‘as White lives’. They state that she maintains she wasn’t being racist, but she would have been well aware how her comments would have been interpreted. At one level, Critical Race Theory’s assumption that all Whites are racist is nothing new. My mother was told she had to be racist back in the 1980s by a group of anti-racism activists sent in to her school. She must be racist, she was told, because she was White and middle class. This says volumes about the unacknowledged racism of these activists.
Postmodern doctrines like Critical Race Theory are seriously damaging real scholarship while at the same time propagating their own forms of racism and intolerance. Pluckrose and her fellows are to be applauded for doing what they can to combat them. And while GB News really is a terrible right-wing broadcaster, it is actually doing immense good by providing an opportunity for the critics of such irrationality and intolerance to speak.
I’m almost two weeks late writing about this, but I think it needs to be covered. On the last day of March, Graham Linehan and his conversationalists on The Mess We’re In channel held their own Trans Day of Visibility. As well as being the writer behind the awesome Father Ted, Linehan is very much a male feminist. He’s become notorious over the past few years for his opposition to the transgender ideology, along with Kellie-Jay Kean, Abigail Shrier, Benjamin Boyce, and the host of another YouTube channel, You’re Kidding, Right?. This last lady presents the arguments against the ideology from the perspective of a Black American woman, which is very enlightening. Especially when she forcefully tells the trans rights activists not to true to compare their ideology to the Civil Rights movement. One of her critics tried to tell her that she was the equivalent of the Klan. Her antecedents came from Georgia when the Klan were powerful and extremely frightening. She made it very, very clear that she was nothing like the Klan. But I digress.
Linehan is joined on his videos with Welsh feminist Helen Staniland and gay Canadian Arty Morty. Morty is, by his own admission, very much a part of the Canadian gay scene and worked as a bar man in a trans bar. Staniland is concerned about the threat to women and girls from biological men being allowed into female spaces on the grounds that they identify as women. Morty is particularly concerned that gender reassignment is being used as a form of conversion therapy to ‘cure’ gender non-conforming children and teens by parents who are afraid that their children will grow up gay. He’s particularly concerned as he was one of these kids. As a boy, he preferred to play with dolls, and he’s afraid that if he was a child today, he would have been put down as transgender and been put on the path to transition.
It was the ‘trans day of visibility’ a few weeks ago, and so Linehan and his friends have as guests in this video their transgender friends and supporters – Debbie Hayton, Miranda Yardlemort, Scott Newgent, and a transman who appears simply as Aaron. These gents and ladies give their perspective on the dangers of trans movement and ideology as transmen and women, and how they came to oppose it.
They did so for a variety of reasons. In the case of Yardlemort, it was through looking at what the gender critical feminists actually wrote for herself, and being horrified at the grotesquely exaggerated response by the trans activists to entirely reasonable points as well as the way opposing feminists were stalked, abused and maltreated. She was also concerned by the way the pro-trans stance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Women actually invalidates those rights and endangers women. She was thrown off Twitter for such crimes as saying that there are only two genders, transwomen shouldn’t be allowed into women’s spaces, and that rape and death threat to women aren’t acceptable. Yardlemort has also suffered her share of bullying from trans activists, as when one tried to take her to court for alleged ‘transphobia’.
Debbie Hayton joined the anti-trans movement because she was afraid that their extreme claims would actually damage the trans movement, and make trans people less accepted. She argues that being gender critical does not mean being anti-trans. She and Helen Staniland looked back to a time when transwomen and women were largely in harmony with each other, although there was occasional conflicts over the inclusion of transwomen in female-only events, such as the Michfest women-only music festival.
They also talk about the vexed issues of pronouns. The attitude of Arty Morty is that, while he doesn’t believe that there should be laws demanding transgender people be referred to be their chosen pronouns, he has no problem doing so for decent people. It’s only the misogynists he refuses to call ‘she’.
Aaron made it very clear that he believes transitioning is beneficial for some people. It worked for him, but he didn’t have a mental illness. This is important, as some of those being diagnosed a transgender may simply be mentally ill or have a neurological condition like autism. He turned against the trans ideology three years ago from concerns about the homophobia. He’s afraid that the excesses of the trans activists, such as the attacks on J.K. Rowling, will eventually lead to a ban on transitions, which will harm those who really need them. He is also afraid, like Linehan, Staniland, Morty and the others, that children and vulnerable adults are being misdiagnosed as trans and consequently mutilated. Debbie Orlander also shares this fear, especially when it comes to children as young as four or five.
Scott Newgent makes the point that part of the problem is medical corporations, who stand to make a profit from these drugs and treatments, telling vulnerable people they have the solution. This is compounded by social media, as Twitter and other sites will not allow the opposing side to be heard. He also makes the point that the trans ideology is supported by genuinely good people, who want to do the right thing, and have been falsely persuaded that the trans issue is the same as gay rights and comparable to the struggle over gay marriage. He believes that there is a positive side to trans activism, but this is a problem as its acceptance leads also to the acceptance of the negative aspects as well. He and the others also take down some of the ridiculously inflated and entirely false claims of the trans activists. Over here in the Blighty, the trans activists wanted a ‘trans day of remembrance’ for all the transgender people, who’ve been murdered. Except the numbers of transgender people who’ve been killed over here is vanishingly small. No transpeople have been killed in Scotland, for example. Newgent makes the same point about similar claims in his part of the US. He attended a talk about trans rights, in which the speaker claimed that trans children in his state of South Dakota were in danger of committing suicide. Except they weren’t. No trans children have committed suicide there.
The peeps do, however, express concerns that these threats and prophecies of suicide may be self-fulling. There is the danger that people, who have been misled into transitioning, may kill themselves when they find that it is not the cure they have been promised. Lesbian girls may be particularly affected by this. One of them talks about how they’re horrified by the the people, who’ve been physically harmed by the treatment – people with osteopathy and shrunken hearts due to puberty blockers and the hormones they’ve been prescribed. There’s also the case of the medical doctor, who contacted Linehan in distress at being officially barred from telling upset trans people that J.K. Rowling does not in fact want to kill them.
The team talk about the toxicity and violence of the trans activists. One of them physically attacked a gender critical feminist, Cathy Brennan, at Speaker’s Corner, a situation made all the worse by the actions of Stonewall, the gay advocacy organisation. They also criticise the left for its handling of the debate. They state that the left is undemocratic, intolerant of free speech and has a problem with racism and misogyny. Stonewall by its actions over a number of issues has provoked a backlash, of which the gender critical movement is only one part.
Hayton is optimistic, believing that more people are turning against the trans movement and being aware how it affects women’s rights and children’s safeguarding, as well as the way it harms transpeople themselves. Fionne, another transwoman, is also optimistic, noting the success of the Keira Bell case. Like Aaron, she believes that medical transition should be an option, but only for adults, not children, who need psychotherapy and a more diverse approach. She believes that transpeople have made a mistake in demanding access to women’s spaces, and should instead have demanded their own, third spaces. Yardlemort actually emailed a number of LGBTQ organisations about the need for gay spaces away from transpeople, but none of them replied.
The team also debate whether Donald Trump was the only person, who would have been able to stop the progress of trans ideology. They feel we need more people like J.K. Rowlings, who stand up to the trans lobby simply out of principle without any benefit to themselves. Newgent states that he has sacrificed his own career for his principles. He states that when it comes to the treatment of children,
I am very much aware that this is a very emotive issue and that many of my readers don’t share my views on this topic. However, I strongly believe that Linehan and his guests here are correct, and that vulnerable people, particularly women and children, are being unnecessarily put on life-changing, harmful medical treatment. And there is a problem with biological men being allowed into female-only spaces, such as prisons. There have been a series of rapes of women prisoners by biological men, who have been placed in women’s prisons because they have identified, or claimed to identify, as women.
I don’t hate transgender people, and definitely don’t wish anyone to come to any harm, much less be killed. But there are genuine dangers here, but unfortunately the climate of liberal opinion and many ‘official’ gay organisations, like Stonewall, mean that the gender critical side is silenced and their arguments not heard.
As you can see from this video, Linehan and his friends very definitely don’t hate transpeople, although they do discuss some extremely dangerous and predatory individuals. And they clearly have friends and supporters in the trans community, who share their concerns.
At the very least, they need to be heard and listened to. The topic should not be the monopoly of intolerant trans activists.
This is actually great. I like Private Eye, but I also have grave criticisms of it. Such as the way it wholeheartedly backed the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, and which it’s still doing to a certain extent. But this time I think they’ve done something genuinely good. They’ve given a good, appreciative review to Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Shrier is one of a growing number of medical professionals, feminist activists and ordinary peeps, who are deeply concerned about the march of trans rights and its excesses. Many of them, such as J.K. Rowling, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, Sheila Jeffries and their male supporters, like former Father Ted writer and comedy legend Graham Linehan, believe that transwomen really aren’t, and can never be, women, and that the acceptance of them as such has grave and detrimental implications for women’s safety and the nature of femininity itself. They are also concerned about the massive increase in children, and especially girls, who are being diagnosed as transgender. They are concerned that this is a profound mistake, and that the reality is that deeply psychological disturbed, vulnerable girls are being influenced and manipulated into believing that they are really boys trapped in the wrong body. This is leading them to possibly unnecessary, life-changing surgery which will leave them infertile and with a range of other, serious medical problems. Shrier and another American researcher, Dr. Debra Soh, share these concerns, though are supportive of older transsexuals.
Unfortunately, the trans lobby, of which gay activist group Stonewall is now a part, are determined to silence any criticism of transpeople and the whole issue of gender reassignment, no matter how polite and well supported by the scientific and medical evidence. Such critics have been reviled as ‘Terfs’ – Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The Irish gender critical group, The Countess Didn’t Fight For This, have also been called ‘Tans’ – presumably a reference to the Black and Tans, the British military auxiliaries, who committed horrendous atrocities during the Irish Revolution, and even ‘British'(!). This is despite the fact that their name refers to the Countess Moskovitz, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who became a socialist, feminist and Irish patriot, serving as a general during the Revolution. Over on this side of the Irish Sea, Rowling was accused of wanting to murder transpeople simply because she said she didn’t believe they were women. The rest of her message was actually very supportive of them. She told them they should dress how they liked, have sex with whoever would have them and live the best life they could – hardly a vicious condemnation. But to the militant trans activists, her refusal to accept them as women meant she had a deep loathing for them and really did wish them harm. They reacted with abuse and have tried to silence her, as they have similar critics.
It’s in this context that Private Eye published its supportive review of Shrier’s book. It’s in the literary column of this fortnight’s issue for 22 January – 4th February 2021. Entitled ‘Agenda Wars’, it runs
Thalidomide for morning sickness. Transorbital lobotomies – an icepick to the eye socket – for unruly psychiatric patients. Agonising vaginal meshes for the incontinent. The history of medicine is littered with confidently prescribed treatments that had terrible side-effects.
According to Abigail Shrier, an American journalist, the pattern is repeating itself with the puberty blockers and testosterone given to teenage girls who declare themselves to be transgender. Yet her bestselling book, Irreversible Damage has been subjected to the liberal version of a fatwa: there were calls to ban or burn it, and it has not been reviewed by the Guardian or the New York Times.
Crack it open, then, and let the wrongthink begin! Except this book has nothing in common with Mein Kampf apart from the idea of a struggle. It is a folksy, anecdotal tour of a well-evidenced phenomenon: in the decade to 2018, the number of female teenagers seeking help from gender clinics in the UK rose by 4,400 per cent. The statistics are similar in other countries.
We know that today’s teenage girls report high rates of anxiety, that they spend hours online, and that, compared with previous generations, fewer drink or get pregnant. So where to these isolated, stressed, straightlaced kids channel their anguish? Shrier’s answer is that they come out as trans. Then, egged on by adult activists and even their schools, they see any parental scepticism – “you’re 14, Flora, perhaps it’s a phase” – as evidence of transphobic bigotry.
Until recently, “transexuality” largely meant people born male who wanted to have surgery and live as women. As a psychological condition, being trans could happen to anyone, regardless of their personal politics. Kellie Maloney was a Ukip candidate and Caitlyn Jenner was a life-long Republican. But its links with fetishism made this model of transness seem grubby; too many women had found lingerie in their house and discovered their husband was having an affair with himself. So left-wing activists, inspired by the gay movement’s successful “born this way” rhetoric, championed the idea of “gender identity”, an inner sense of self. Being trans was now nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with living your life. Happily for commercial medicine in the US, surgery and hormones could help with that.
Shrier is very clear that adult transition, which she supports, is very different from “rapid onset gender dysphoria”(ROGD) among teenagers. It is an important distinction: trans adults should be entitled to free, safe, empathetic medical care. (In 1972, Jan Morris had to have her surgery in Morocco.) There are also a handful of children whose gender distress is “insistent, consistent and persistent”.
But girls with ROGD are a distinct group. The tend to announce their transness suddenly, along with others in their peer group, and regurgitate the language of forums where being non-binary or something more exotic (lumigender, anyone?) brings great social cachet. They are anxious and unhappy: they don’t want to be degraded like the “teen sluts ” on Pornhub and they can’t imagine being as flawlessly feminine as an Instagram influencer. The answer to these feelings used to be feminism. Now it’s gender identity: they’re not like the other girls, because they’re not girls at all. Shrier argues that ROGD is closer to anorexia than to, say, being a goth – and we don’t treat eating disorders with liposuction.
In Britain the tide is turning against the snap diagnosis of unhappy girls as happy-boys-in-waiting. An English court ruled that under-16s are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to puberty blockers, since these drugs almost always lead to cross-sex hormones (and therefore infertility and impaired sexual function). Fox-bothering QC Jolyon Maugham is trying to get this overturned, but the ruling has emboldened activists – who have faced threats, harassment and career penalties – to demand evidence for the frequent claim that teenage transition “saves lives”. So far, England’s only child gender clinic, the Tavistock, has been unable to produce such evidence.
What comes across from Shrier’s book is the real unhappiness of too many teenage girls – and the mix of groupthink and arrogance which suggests that the answer must be today’s equivalent of an icepick to the eye socket.
Critics of ROGD have also pointed out that, if left to themselves, 80 per cent of child transgender cases sort themselves out naturally. The child becomes a normal member of his or her natural sex. But almost all children put on puberty blockers go on to have surgery. If that’s the case, then the majority of such kids are being horribly mutilated, primarily for ideological rather than medical reasons.
Furthermore, despite the liberal rejection of critics of the transgender movement, not all such critics are Conservatives. Kellie-Jay Keen and Graham Linehan are people of the left, as is the female Guardian journo who found herself sacked from the newspaper for not following the pro-trans line. They appear in right-wing media because it’s only these media that’s giving them space to air their views and concerns. That has to change.
I don’t wish to spread hate against transgender people, or see them suffer abuse or assault. But there is another side to this argument, and in my view that side is thoroughly based on scientific and medical fact and motivated by deep moral concerns. From what I’ve seen, the intolerance, including violent assault as well as abuse, comes from the trans side. I hope therefore more books like this will be published and people are made aware that there is also another view, which needs to be seriously considered.
For those wishing to see more from Abigail Shrier, She’s been interviewed on YouTube by Graham Linehan and Kellie-Jay Keen.
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