Jessica Kant’s analysis of the anti-trans outrage factory is well worth your time.
…any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pogroms at other times in history… why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? Because powerful people won’t stop claiming it’s true, even if evidence to the contrary is everywhere.
Dr Ruth Pearce has written a very good overview of Labour’s new Section 28, proposals that “seek to erase trans children: through extreme restrictions on social transition, toilet and sports bans, and censorship of the word “trans” itself. Like Section 28, they will most likely also create a wider chilling effect, reducing support for lesbian, gay, bi, and gender-nonconforming young people as well.”
Hilary Cass, author of the disgraceful and damaging Cass Review into trans teens’ healthcare, told The Times in 2024 that “What is worrying is when people say that if children don’t get these drugs, they will die, because clearly that’s not true”; it was “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”
Thanks to a freedom of information request we know that removing gender-affirming care from trans teens in 2021, which NHS England did in the aftermath of the (very dodgy and later overturned) Keira Bell case, led to a surge in teen suicides.
5 trans children killed themselves in England in 2019/20; 4 trans children killed themselves in 2020/21; and in 2021/22, when gender-affirming care was first shut down, 22 trans children killed themselves.
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, of course, and people kill themselves for all kinds of reasons. Maybe it was the healthcare. Maybe they were bullied. Maybe their families treated them terribly. Maybe it was some or all of those things combined in a climate that’s increasingly hateful towards trans people. But there is plenty of evidence that the anti-trans panic kills children and will continue to do so. The self-appointed “protectors of children” have blood on their hands.
In 2022, The Times reported that the Tavistock gender clinic was going to be sued by thousands of families whose children “claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers”.
The story, while widely circulated and repeated, was never true. It couldn’t be: that number would mean almost every young person referred to endocrinology at the Tavistock would be suing. In fact, the number of families suing the clinic through the law firm quoted in the story is zero, as a new freedom of information request reveals.
This is just the latest in a very long list of stories that were clearly bullshit from the outset. I suspect the people who wrote those stories were well aware of that.
It’s very telling that the most vocal self-appointed “protectors of women and girls” have nothing to say about the absolutely horrific production of AI-generated sexual abuse images of real women and children that’s happening on X on an industrial scale.
As they continue to post on X, in many cases paying for the privilege to do so, the anti-trans activists, columnists, politicians and publishers are making it very clear that while the existence of trans women in public is beyond the pale for them, widespread image-based sexual abuse of women and children is not.
The Kirkcudbright Book Festival line-up for March 2026 has been announced, and it’s a typically eclectic and interesting selection. I’ll be appearing on the Saturday morning to chat about Small Town Joy and the liberating power of music.
The lovely Alistair Braidwood of Scots Whay Hae! has picked Small Town Joy as one of his ten best non-fiction books of 2025. “If you love music, this is a book for you.”
The genital obsessed weirdos’ crusade against trans people is global, so there have attempts to bring in a UK-style “emergency” ban on puberty blockers for trans kids in New Zealand as part of the moral panic there. But unlike the UK, whose judiciary seems to be an easy mark for junk science peddled by dubiously funded hate groups, that country’s High Court is having none of it.
In a newly published judgement, the court ruled that there was “no evidence of a particular need to act urgently to prevent new prescriptions because of some immediate risk to physical health if young people commence treatment.” It also noted that “Puberty blockers are reversible. There is no evidence that they affect fertility. If they did, they would hardly be prescribed for children with precocious puberty and they have been prescribed for that purpose for decades.”
The judgement continued: “The evidence relating to mental health outcomes suggests negative outcomes from a ban are a far more immediate concern.”
In the words of the High Court, a ban on puberty blockers purely for trans kids is “discriminatory” because the supposed safety concerns are not being used to demand a similar ban for kids who aren’t trans.
There has been a flood of despicable reporting around the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, much of it by people who clearly didn’t let a minor matter such as reading the actual judgement get in the way of publishing their pre-written pieces. This, by Rivkah Brown, should make them ashamed of themselves. It won’t, because they’re too far gone. But what’s detailed in the tribunal evidence bears little or no relation to what the majority of the press wants you to believe.
TransActual have published a document detailing people’s experiences of Britain’s EHRC-approved crotch cops. It makes grim reading, and demonstrates yet again that the piss police will be coming for anyone considered not sufficiently feminine enough.