Category: Bullshit

  • Stacking the deck

    Yesterday, Wes Streeting made the UK ban on puberty blockers for trans kids permanent. The ban does not apply to cisgender children; puberty blockers are apparently magic medicine that are uniquely dangerous to trans and gender non-conforming kids. The decision was subject to a consultation, which – at the Government’s invitation – featured significant input…

  • Enemies within

    The evangelical movement has spent a very long time practicing institutional capture, where it inserts its people into positions where they can enact its policies. And the same appears to be happening with the anti-trans movement here in the UK, with “gender-critical” people who reject the scientific and medical evidence increasingly inhaibiting positions where they…

  • Masks off, hoods on

    Maslow’s Hammer says that “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if you’re an anti-trans obsessive, everything can and should be blamed on trans people, including the US election result. The narrative already emerging from the anti-trans commentariat on both…

  • Misreporting

    Let’s do this again, shall we? There have been a spate of important trans-related stories in the press this week, and predictably they have all been misreported. First up, after a long inquiry into the trans charity Mermaids, the Charity Commission found no evidence of the wrongdoing alleged by anti-trans activists and their pals in…

  • Spot the difference

    The UK isn’t the only place where “reasonable concerns” over trans healthcare have sparked official reviews. It’s happened in Queensland too, sparking a review very similar to NHS England’s Cass Review. But despite reviewing very similar evidence, this review resulted in a doubling of funding for trans healthcare. Here in the UK, the Cass Review…

  • Perverse incentives

    One of the “keyboard warriors” who fuelled the recent English racist riots, Twitter user WayneGb88, appeared in court yesterday and was jailed for three years. During the trial, he told the court that he earns approximately £1,400 per month from posting hate speech on the former Twitter. This is why hate speech is everywhere: it…

  • Anatomy of a scandal

    This, by Lydia Polgreen, is superb: The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids. It’s about the Cass Review. As much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, nonbinary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in…

  • State-sanctioned harm

    Scientific American reports that the Cass Review has led to “a plethora of abuses and humiliations” for young trans people, which for some includes forced detransition. We estimate more than 1,000 trans adolescents in the U.K. now find that their treatment is illegal. Families risk an up to two-year prison sentence for supporting a child’s…

  • Both-sidesing bigotry

    Stop me if you’ve heard this before: politicians, the BBC and the press are reporting outright bigotry as “concerns” and one side of a “controversy” or “debate”. Not genital-obsessed weirdos this time, at least not today, although I’m sure the Venn diagram of those people and today’s bunch has a lot of overlap: this time…

  • Cass: MMR all over again

    I think in years to come the Cass Review, and the media’s complicity, will be viewed in much the same way as Andrew Wakefield’s infamous MMR scare and its promotion by Private Eye and UK newspapers. Unfortunately like Wakefield, it will continue to harm people until and long after it’s been fully discredited and its…