Today’s papers are giving lots of space to The Sullivan Review, the latest anti-trans stitch-up initiated by the previous government under the banner of “kicking woke ideology out of science” and amplified by the current Health Minister. Transactual:

Prof. Alice Sullivan is a prominent anti-trans activist and advisory group member of the leading anti-trans lobby group, Sex Matters, notable for her work on UK literacy. The report also contains legal advice written by the husband of the Chair of the Sex Matters’ Trustee Board, Naomi Cunningham, and research was commissioned for the review to an organisation led by fellow member of the Sex Matters’ advisory group Lucy Hunter Blackburn.

Here’s data expert Kevin Guyan:

The DSIT and UK Government, researchers, funders and public bodies need to recognise this Trumpian intervention for what it is: an attempt to erase trans and non-binary people from existing in data.

It, the Cass Review and the forthcoming Levy Review of adult healthcare are all part of the same project: to drive trans people out of public life in the UK.

One of the many bullshit stories pushed into the press by genital-obsessed weirdos and their pet minister Wes Streeting this week has been the idea that transgender doctors are hiding evidence of terrible misdeeds by changing their gender.

Headlines such as “GMC erases records on doctors who change gender”, “Doctors who change gender have wrongdoing ‘erased’ from public record, GMC admits” and “Fury as it’s revealed medics’ disciplinary records are ERASED from public view when they change gender” might lead you to believe that when a doctor transitions, their disciplinary history is deleted.

Nope. Writing to Streeting and the UK’s other health secretaries last week, the GMC explained that yes, transitioned doctors get a new GMC identification number in order to comply with the law and protect their privacy. But “their fitness to practise history and any risk they may still present to the public attaches to an individual and remains the same whether or not their gender identity changes… all fitness to practise history is accurately displayed on the records of all of those doctors and no fitness to practise history has been removed or suppressed.”

What’s going on here isn’t just the press happily spouting whatever bullshit the hate groups come up with, although that’s a huge and ongoing part of it. It’s that the press is actively collaborating with hate groups to paint *existing while trans* as deviant and dangerous.

The implication of “erasing” records – and of words such as “wrongdoing” – is that all trans doctors have something to hide. The reality is that trans doctors, like trans people more generally, are being targeted by bigots simply for being trans.

The same thing is at the root of the current high-profile, celebrity endorsed NHS tribunals which, thanks to some appalling judicial decisions, have been turned into show trials against individual trans women who are being defamed and demonised not just on social media but in the pages of newspapers too. The goal is to enshrine in law the idea that the very presence of a trans woman at work is terrifying and traumatic, and that as a result banning trans women, or refusing to hire trans women, is both reasonable and proportionate.

There’s been some really horrific persecution of trans people in the US in just the last week: a trans military ban, a de facto ban on trans people getting visas that attempts to define being trans as committing fraud, a ban on all trans healthcare in some states, mass sackings of LGBTQ+ government employees, and much more.

All of these things are on the British bigots’ list of demands too. Which perhaps explains why so-called “gender critical” women journalists in the UK press have been filing columns about how in their eyes Donald Trump is a feminist hero.

None of this is about “reasonable concerns” or protecting anybody from anything. It’s about eradicating people from society. Trans women are the first targets, but they won’t be the last.

Yet another damning review of the Cass scandal has been published, this time in the New England Journal of Medicine. The publication is one of the world’s most respected peer-reviewed journals, and in a better world this article would be the final stake through the Cass review’s heart.

The article says that Cass’s report “transgresses medical law, policy and practice… deviates from pharmaceutical regulatory standards in the United Kingdom. And if it had been published in the United States… it would have violated federal law.” The review misrepresented data to arrive at conclusions the data did not support, it did not follow established scientific methods, it did not follow international publication standards and is so clearly a stitch-up that “observers must speculate about who else participated in the manuscript’s drafting — and whether they held bias against LGBTQ+ people.”

The review was a foregone conclusion, as Kemi Badenoch has already admitted; its job was to rubber-stamp transphobia, and anti-trans activists were deliberately placed in “the positions that mattered most in Equalities and Health.” It is as unscientific and as wicked as the anti-trans measures Donald Trump is expected to announce in the US later today, measures that will make the lives of trans and non-binary people immeasurably harder and will undoubtedly kill some and damage more for no reason other than bigotry and cruelty.

We know that more than a dozen trans teens have taken their lives since the puberty blocker ban was introduced in the UK, despite the government’s best efforts to cover that up: its small inquiry into trans suicides discounted documented trans suicides. So it’s particularly disgusting to see Hilary Cass, the author of the politically motivated and utterly discredited Cass scandal that’s being used to dismantle trans healthcare, to proclaim 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 is “irresponsible for people to shroud-wave in that way.”

Not for the first time, Cass is parroting the stories of hateful, genital-obsessed weirdos. Morgan Page writes:

The spectre of the trans death, particularly through suicide, hangs over all of the attacks on trans life. No one wants to admit that this is the desired end goal — that trans people simply cease to exist, whether that be through detransition or death seems to matter little. As Janice Raymond famously put it, the goal is for trans people to be “morally mandated out of existence.” Indeed, “shroud waving” threatens to stir up some empathy for the plight of this embattled minority, and we can’t be having that. Anti-trans actors have gone so far as to accuse trans people of acting like abusive husbands who threaten to kill themselves if their wives leave.

It’s a useful strategy, this attack on the idea of trans death, because most cis people will never know a living trans person, let alone a dead one.

It’s worth pointing out yet again that despite its very best efforts the Cass study found no evidence that puberty blockers harmed kids. It did, however, see plenty of evidence that limiting access to healthcare and support kills some of them.

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 sides of the Atlantic is that the Kamala Harris campaign failed because of The Transes. And as always with the anti-trans mob, that’s nonsense. The Harris campaign conceded The Trans Issue – how I hate that phrase – completely: it didn’t feature trans people in its campaigning, it didn’t stand up for trans people, and even when given the opportunity to refute the Republicans’ anti-trans scaremongering in direct questioning – by some estimates, as much as 40% of the Republicans’ ad spending was spent on demonising trans women – Kamala Harris flatly refused to do so, calculatedly throwing trans people under the bus in the hope of winning a few bigots’ votes.

But the problem with offering far right lite is that nobody’s buying it. Time and again, given the choice between full-on evil and slightly less evil, people choose the full-fat version. The supposed good guys concede territory to the bad, and having done that the bad guys demand they concede more.

What far-right lite does do, however, is alienate some of your own voting base – without bringing any of the other side across. When the Democrats weren’t throwing trans people under the bus, they persuaded 6% of registered Republicans to vote Democrat. In this election, that figure didn’t increase. It dropped, to 5%, with the Republicans’ total vote numbers remaining roughly the same as in the last election. This wasn’t an anti-trans swing to Trump.

You cannot meet bigots halfway because they lie about where halfway is. You can see that here in the UK: the supposed “reasonable concerns” (which were never reasonable) over trans people were only supposed to be over changes to the Gender Recognition Act; when they destroyed those changes, the bigots then decided they wanted rid of the Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act and all other protections for trans people. Supposed concerns over healthcare for under-18s – again, never reasonable – have now expanded to demands for an end to all healthcare for trans adults – demands that as I and many other trans women can attest, are already being met by some GPs and health boards.

The panic is such that organisations are now being attacked for doing things that only the deeply deranged could see through an anti-trans lens; for example this week, Marks & Spencer has been under sustained online and media attack for referring to teenage girls as “bright young things”, a decades-old phrase that the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade have decided is proof of pro-trans pandering.

What we have now is a full-on, mask-off, hoods-on witch-hunt dedicated to erasing every aspect of trans people’s rights and safety until the goal of eliminating trans people completely is achieved – a witch-hunt in which the press is gleefully, hatefully complicit.