Anti-Trans Activist Kelly-Jay Keen Standing for Women against Keir Starmer at the Next Election

A week or so ago Kelly-Jay Keen announced that she intends to stand as a candidate under her ‘Standing for Women’ banner against Keir Starmer at the next election. She had originally said that she would stand against Eddie Izzard if the Labour party selected him as their candidate in Sheffield. Keen is unhappy with drag, viewing as ‘womanface’ comparable to Blackface as an expression of prejudice and hostility towards those it caricatures. She did, however, like Izzard. She admired him as a comedian and had absolutely no problem with him when he identified as a transvestite. She turned against him when he announced that he had gone into ‘girl mode’ and was now a woman, despite being biologically male. She was particularly not impressed with Izzard running a marathon in fake boobs. Izzard lost the selection battle, the winning candidate being someone with a very Muslim name. One of the candidates Izzard was up against was a local, Asian woman, who had been a charity worker as well as a long term activist in the Labour party. It was natural that Sheffield Labour party would chose a local person, who had been active in the constituency for years, rather than an outsider. I don’t think the Asian lady was the successful candidate, but I’m sure the same reasons applied. I think there’s an element of deliberately sticking two fingers up to Starmer in this, as I’ve got a feeling that Izzard was Starmer’s preferred candidate. Now that Izzard is out of the running, Keen is going after Starmer, especially because many women feel betrayed with the Labour party over the trans issue.

Starmer has stated that the Labour party is fully for the trans rights campaign. I got an email from deputy head Angela Rayner and the head of LGBT Labour that if the Labour party was elected, they would outlaw all conversion therapies. This set alarm bells ringing in me. As Gay anti-trans activists like EDIjester and Clive Simpson have pointed out, the sadistic, inhumane and barbarous pseudo-medical practices used to try to turn gay people straight are illegal today. There’s simply no need for it. Modern conversion therapy involves psychiatric or religious counselling, which is voluntary. From American examples, and a brief story about one such in-patient centre in Wales in the ‘In the Back’ column in Private Eye some time ago, this can still be extremely unpleasant, and I don’t blame anyone for wanting to have this treatment very carefully monitored and legislated for.

But the ban on conversion therapy brings its own, anti-gay dangers. The Labour party also wishes to ban conversion therapy for transgender people. This could mean that they desire only the affirmative care model to be used in the treatment of transgender people. This mandates that someone going to the therapist believing that they are in the wrong sexed body should be affirmed in their gender identity and consequently set on a path to transition, complete with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and finally surgery. Gender transition may be appropriate for some, but it is grossly inappropriate for others. There are issues with the mentally ill and autistic children being incorrectly diagnosed as transgender. Gender-critical gays have also argued that it is being used by homophobic parents to ‘trans the gay away’. This is based on the very high number of gender non-conforming children being brought to the Tavistock centre, who, if left on their own, would probably grow up gay but with a stable personality and identifying with their biological sex.

Keen is particularly concerned with the way the gender ideology is detrimentally affecting women’s sex-based rights. Trans rights activists demand transwomen be identified as real women and so have access to all female-only spaces. This has meant that in Scotland and California violent, biological men have been incarcerated in women’s prisons because they have declared themselves to be trans. The American anti-trans lesbian activist, Arielle Scarcella, recently put up a post about a report in the Scottish Daily Record that most of the men, who were transferred to female prisons claiming they were transgender, made minimal effort to behave in a feminine way and went back to being blokes after they were released. If this is true, then they were obviously lying to get out of being sent to the much tougher male prisons. She also posted about the problem of violent, sexual predators being put in women’s prisons because they identify as female. These are men guilty of rape and child abuse. One of the most notorious of these was 6′ 3” and guilty of assaulting a 12 year old girl in a ladies’ loo. She escaped by whacking him in the happy sacks and running away. These men, it has been alleged, have deliberately arranged to enter women’s prisons so they can terrorise the women there. I’ve no doubt this is true, not because they are trans, but because they are sadistic rapists and predators. They should not be imprisoned with women, or at least, not the general population.

There are similar problems with toilets and changing rooms in schools and sports facilities. In sport particularly, born women feel that they are being robbed of victories and opportunities by men like Lia Thomas, who seem to have opportunistically changed their gender. There are also related issues of dignity and care in medicine, with women being denied treatment by members of their own sex because of the ideology. And so on. Women are particularly vulnerable to the spread of the ideology and the feeling that they are really trans. For many activists and medical personnel critical of the ideology, it’s a psychological contagion like the spread of anorexia and eating disorders in the 1970s. In America, girls as young as 12 have had mastectomies. Some of those, who have transitioned have no come to feel it was wrong, and are detransitioning. Their stories are heartbreaking. One Dutch male detransitioner, who had been left with severe bowel and bladder problems following surgical transition, put up a tearful video last week announcing he was going for medical euthanasia as he could no longer live with these problems.

This is also not an organic movement. It is not grassroots, despite what trans activists claim. It is funded and promoted by big business and particularly the pharmaceutical companies producing the drugs. It is also extremely lucrative for those clinics providing the treatment. And some of the lobby groups in America promoting the ideology have received extensive funding from freedom of speech groups, who in turn are funded by the pornography industry.

This is a movement that demands very close scrutiny, if not to be actively fought. There are gay and trans people actively critiquing and opposing it, like Gays Against Groomers and Trans Against Groomers. But the mainstream gay organisations like Stonewall are actively promoting it, to the exclusion of gay interests. There have been complaints from the gay community that when a delegation was put together for some kind of mission to promote gay rights, it was composed entirely of gay men and transwomen. Lesbians were not represented, despite having suffered the same prejudice and persecution as gay men.

But the Labour party is captured. My local branch in Bristol passed a motion censuring the initial judgement in favour of Keira Bell, which ruled that this young woman had been misled and so damaged through medical treatment involving puberty blockers. The LGBT officer blandly stated that puberty blockers were safe and completely reversible. This has been revealed as untrue. I opposed the motion, and was thanked by some of the women afterwards for doing so, but the motion was passed. Militant trans activists spoke at the Labour party conference. The LGB Alliance, which was formed especially to fight for the rights of gay people against the trans ideology, was denied a place when they applied.

Starmer has said he will back trans rights, and made a public fool of himself by running away from questions about the fundamental nature of womanhood. When asked if women had cervixes, he refused to answer the question and said it was one that shouldn’t be asked. He has also apparently stated that if Labour gets in, legislation will be passed demanding the use of trans people’s preferred pronouns. This is the issue that catapulted conservative ideologue Jordan Peterson into the public limelight. When that legislation was being mooted in Canada – I think it may even have been passed – Peterson stated that he would defy the law. He also made it clear that if a student in his class was transgender, he would of course do them the courtesy of using their preferred pronouns.

Keen does not expect to win, but she intends to use the opportunity to raise questions and promote her cause, not just against Starmer but all politicians supporting the trans ideology. She has had a problem with advertising in the past. When she paid for a billboard in Liverpool to show the dictionary definition of woman as ‘adult human female’, which is the common sense definition, the local council banned it as hate speech. But if she registers as a political candidate, it will be impossible for councils to do this as censuring free speech and political debate.

I don’t think she’ll win, as she herself admits. The election is still some way off yet, and she intends to do more foreign tours to places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand first. But it should make for a very interesting election.

Here’s the video in which she announces her intention to stand against Starmer

Graham Linehan’s Trans Day of Visibility: It’s Against a Harmful Ideology, Not People

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.

Bristol South’s Motion Condemning Keira Bell Decision

My local constituency Labour party, Bristol South, passed another motion at the monthly meeting last Thursday, to which I am very strongly opposed. This motion was brought by the LGBTQ+ officer and another, long-standing local party officer and activist condemning the judge’s decision on a case brought by a detransitioning transperson, Keira Bell. As I understand it, Bell had been a minor when she decided that she was in the wrong body. This was supported by the medical professionals who treated her, and she was given gender reassignment treatment, transitioning from a girl to a young man. However, she now believes that this was wrong, and that as a child she was unable to make a proper decision on this immensely serious, life-changing process, and therefore sued. The judge has concurred, ruling in her favour.

This has upset the trans rights lobby and very many LGBTQ+ activists. One of the complaints of a number of gays is that the mainstream, established gay rights organisations such as Stonewall have been captured, as they see it, by the trans lobby, and a proper concern for securing the equality and dignity of ordinary gay and bisexual men and women has been ditched in favour of an inflexible, doctrinaire demand for gay rights. It is an immensely controversial issue. Gender critical feminists, who believe in the reality and primacy of biological sex over gender and the idea that someone can be a member of the opposite sex simply by identifying with it mentally, have been abused as ‘Terfs’ (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and worse. They have received threats of death, rape and sexual mutilation by enraged transgender activists. J.K. Rowling, the author of the ‘Harry Potter’ novels, has been accused of hating transpeople and wanting to kill them simply because she posted a tweet stating that ‘transwomen are not women’. Nothing she said was remotely hateful. Far from it. She actually urged transpeople to have the best life they could, dress how they want and sleep with whoever would have them. She just didn’t regard them as real women. That’s it. But because of this she has been mercilessly pilloried and vilified.

The transition of children is of particular concern. The American lawyer and writer Abigail Shrier has argued in her book that the sudden rise in young girls feeling unhappy with their sex and wishing to transition into boys does not come from an authentic confusion or dissatisfaction with their sexual identity. Many of the young people affected have previously shown no unhappiness with it, or any desire to transition. Rather this sudden desire to change sex is a psychological illness created partly by the promotion of gender and trans ideology on the internet acting on deep-seated but common anxieties about sex and their bodies that many girls go through when entering puberty. She compares it to other, pernicious and destructive psychological diseases such as anorexia and bulimia. There have also been concerns that many of the young people, who were persuaded by organisations like the Tavistock institute, that they are transgender are in fact merely autistic, and that the psychological symptoms of that condition have been misinterpreted. Gender critical gays and lesbians have also claimed that many of the children, who are put forward for gender treatment, are in fact not transgender but simply gays, who don’t conform to gender-typical norms. Again, Linehan and his friends and conversationalists in the gay community have expressed concerns that many of the parents of children treated by the Tavistock institute and elsewhere, were homophobic. They were unable to come to terms with the possibility that their child might be gay, finding it easier to believe instead that they were in the wrong body. If this is true, then these gender critical gays are absolutely correct to condemn the transitioning of such children as a form of anti-gay conversion therapy, as nasty as the other forms which enlightened governments around the world are seeking to proscribe.

At the moment children confused about their gender identity are given puberty blockers to stave off the onset of physical adulthood. This is intended to give them time to consider properly whether they really want to go through with transition. The drugs are supposed to be safe and fully reversible.

The drugs’ opponents are convinced they are not. In interview on Newsnight, the writer, comedian and broadcaster Graham Linehan stated that the drug used, Lupron, was developed to treat men with terminal prostate cancer. Its effects on teenage girls is unknown.

See: Father Ted creator Graham Linehan on trans rights – BBC Newsnight – YouTube

He and others, who share his concerns, argue that the drugs are not reversible and may have serious physical side effects, such as lower bone density leading to a greater vulnerability to osteoporosis. It is also claimed that 80 to 90 per cent of children, who identify as members of the opposite sex, actually grow out of it once they become adults. They mature into either straight or gay members of their sex. On the other hand, according to one study, the overwhelming majority of children put on puberty blockers go on to cross-sex hormones and then gender reassignment surgery. If this is also true, then the use of puberty blockers as treatment is leading to the transition of children, who don’t need it. Especially as cross section hormones seem to have very serious effects.

I tried to raise these issues with the LGBTQ+ officer in the time allowed for us to ask questions regarding the motion she had proposed. I am not a medical person, and admit that in this matter I am merely an ordinary member of the British public who is influenced by what he sees and reads on the Net. The LGTBQ+ officer’s motion was impressive. She clearly laid out her case and it was supported by footnotes. It was also clear that she was acting from a position of genuine concern with the potential harm done by the judicial decision.

She replied that the drugs are fully reversible, that the loss of bone density was not a danger and that children were not being wrongly transitioned. One of the objections to transgender therapy is that it demands that the patient’s trans identity should also be reinforced and supported. Hence medical professionals may be wrongly convincing confused people that they are transgender. The young woman responded instead that this was not the case, but it had been found that patients responded better if their trans identity was supported. But if the patients decided transitioning was not for them, that would be supported too. She was also worried that the judge’s decision would undermine Gillick, which provides for children to receive contraceptive or abortion advice and assistance without the knowledge or consent of their parents. She dismissed the objections to the use of puberty blockers as misinformation. It was bad science, like climate change denial, especially as much of it came from the religious right.

I strongly disagree. I believe instead that the bad science is that embraced by those supporting the use of puberty blocker and trans ideology. For example, according to the website, Transgender Trend, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on June 30th 2020, reported that NHS England was no longer saying that puberty blockers were fully reversible. The NHS’ website states that GIDS, an organisation closely associated with the Tavistock Institute, advises that puberty blockers are fully reversible if stopped. But it also says that their long-term psychological effects are not known. It also states that the possible side effects of puberty blockers are hot flushes, fatigue and mood changes. The website also removes the previous claim that without such treatment, trans children are vulnerable to self-harm and suicide. I believe this was a claim made by the LGBTQ+ officer, but my memory may well be playing tricks. Instead the NHS simply states that they may suffer from depression, anxiety and distress.

The World.wng.org website also cites a report by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust of December 2nd, 2020, that all but one of a group of children put on puberty blockers then went on to cross sex hormones. This also noted changes in children’s bone density and that their normal growth flatlined. There was also no improvement in their psychological wellbeing. The website also cited Michael Laidlaw, and endocrinologist of Rocklin, California, that there was also a loss of bone density which put such children at risk of stunted height and osteoporosis.

See: Are puberty blockers reversible? The NHS no longer says so (transgendertrend.com)

Study: Effects of puberty-blockers can last a lifetime – Sexuality – WORLD (wng.org)

It may well be that these sites are aligned with the right. The WORLD site seems to be. But their articles are properly referenced with links to their sources, which includes NHS England and the Beeb’s Woman’s Hour. I therefore believe that objections to this information because of the overall political bias of the sites are false, and trust the information they provide. Which supports what Linehan and others have been saying, as well as the American endocrinology Dr. William Malone in his interview with YouTuber Benjamin Boyce.

As for the objection that the Keira Bell judgement undermines Gillick, I do not believe that the two are entirely comparable. Transgender treatment leads to profound, permanent physical changes that affect a person for the rest of their life. It also has to be said that the children coming for such treatment are too young that in law they are barred from seeing certain types of film, buying alcohol and tobacco and so on. The fact the law deems them incapable of purchasing those items in the views of the gender critical movement supports the idea that children are not capable of deciding whether or not they wish to change gender.

I say here that I certainly do not hate transpeople. I have every sympathy with those who are confused about their gender. I do not wish them, nor anyone else, to be harmed or victimised in any way. But I think the current transgender ideology, and particularly as it is applied to children, is doing immense unintended harm.

I therefore believe that while Bristol South’s motion was proposed and passed in entirely good faith and from the very best motives, it is utterly and profoundly wrong and mistaken. I therefore fully support the Keira Bell judgement.