It would seem perfectly obvious to me that a girl growing up in an abusive environment might, out of desperation, simply deny their body – what they see as the reason for the abuse. The real reason being, of course, predatory males.

It’s not so much about wishing to transition, to become male, as wishing to stop being female, and with every passing month from puberty onwards, becoming more obviously female. But instead of these girls being protected, the authorities are choosing to ignore the abuse and instead take the easy option of pandering to gender ideology.

There will be a very small number of young people whose body just feels like its the wrong sex, and the relevant pathways should be available to help them. But i do also wonder how much those involved in trans activism, whether as professionals or as agitators, are pushing the issue of abuse under the carpet. Their stridency may well spring from a subconscious despair with themselves for doing so.

What’s becoming increasingly apparent is that there is a concerted effort to push children into transgenderism. We need to find out how this movement is being funded and by whom. It is no coincidence that it’s being pushed by so many organizations in so many countries all at once. Where is the money coming from for this large-scale child abuse?

Chilling read in more ways than one.
I do think that we should help everyone live their lives in the way they choose including their gender identity. But having children take irreversible decisions with their body is clearly step to far. The dogma that every gender identity issue is simply because they were born that way and only solution is immediate gender change, doesn’t seem to hold true.
First and foremost we need to prevent the horrific abuses described. If they do happen, let’s give those tortured little souls love, space and time to heal and decide their own future not out of fear, pain and anger, and with benefit of maturity surely needed for such choices.

An excellent and much-needed article about something which would normally go unheard.
I criticised Julie Bindel for an article just before Christmas (probably about her apparent hostility to men in general), but noted that she was still needed because she sometimes says something important we need to hear. This article proves it.
It’s also reassuring to see some properr investigative journalism. I hope Julie is able to pass on some of her skills here to the next generation of journalists.

“During that two hour visit, over 30 convicted male sex offenders were later identified from CCTV footage.” 
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, 

This is horrific. The rise in young women presenting as trans has been a worrying trend for years and has happened IN PLAIN SIGHT. The link with abuse survival is, I admit, new to me but reading this, it is logical given what survivors have endured. Self-harm is a cry for help. There’s also a correlation with autism and teenage girls in gender distress. Yet, here we are in Scotland with self-ID passed for 16 year olds by a parliament refusing to acknowledge the very real dangers this presents for vulnerable teenagers – those we have a duty to protect.
The reality is that it’s near impossible to challenge this ideology in schools as it’s so cleverly bound up with the ‘rights’ agenda. Changing gender is viewed as ‘coming out’, just the same as you would were you gay, which is so dangerously misguided. An ‘end point’. A solution. Social affirmation/ social transitioning is now the norm for a teenager in gender distress (and yet, Dr Hilary Cass’s interim report on the Tavistock called this a major intervention, which it plainly is.) It is near impossible for professionals to challenge the orthodoxy, although many will know deep down this isn’t the correct course. They rely on government for ‘guidance’ and have little choice but to follow ‘guidance’ heavily influenced by the trans lobby (this is true in Scotland.)
How many more Blackpool’s are there? Where is the mainstream media in reporting this dark side? Some politicians are brave enough to put their heads above the parapet and stand up with integrity against the crowd – I applaud Ash Regan MSP in Scotland – but too few are.

Really interesting article, thank you. This connection had occurred to me, too. It makes sense that a young woman being sexually preyed upon by men might consider un-femaling herself. I wonder if some of these same girls and young women might have become ‘baby dykes’ once?

The health of all children needs to be of real importance to us all — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.
A mentally healthy future is every child’s moral right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.
Perhaps foremost to consider is that during their first three to six years of life (depending on which expert one asks) children have particularly malleable minds, thus they’re exceptionally vulnerable to whatever rearing environment in which they happened to have been placed by often-enough-cruel fate.
Intense trauma from unchecked toxic abuse, sexual or otherwise, usually results in a helpless child’s brain improperly developing. If allowed to continue for a prolonged period, it can act as a starting point into a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines.
It has been described as a continuous, discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’ and simultaneously being scared of how badly you will deal with the upsetting event, which usually never transpires.

Such a sad article. Apart from these poor girls in Blackpool is there a wider sense among young women that they are vulnerable, a state to be feared and resented, as an increasing number of men seem to be less constrained by out of date moral conventions?

It’s interesting to me that referrals for anorexia/eating disorders in teenage girls has decreased while the referrals for gender dysphoria have increased.

What is truly sad is that n*nces will be drawn equally if not more so to trans boys as that will stand them out as “low self esteem” and “vulnerable”. Not to mention that boys are not immune to abuse.
I follow the train of thought leading to this conclusion but it is flawed on so many levels.

Because my family lived there for a time in the early Fifties, Blackpool was the scene of some of my earliest memories. Seen from the perspective of the life I live now it was a dark and depressed place even then, but for very different reasons. It was a vacation spot for industrial workers – Britain had industries back then – who piled off trains for their one week off, stayed at boardinghouses, and spent their week off eating junk food and complaining about the rain. I liked to toddle for miles along the beach among the fat people sprawled in deck chairs, but was warned against going into the water, which was a fetid mixture of tanker washings and raw sewage that had been released on the last high tide.
I was bullied by my peers for being the weird kid who liked books, but at least I saw no sign of adult predators in those days.

Well done to Julie Bindel on this, but I do wish she could leave out her dislike of men generally in her framing of it.

I wish we could stop saying “female to male” and vice versa it’s impossible but somehow bolsters the lie that this is what happens. I know it’s more unwieldy to say girls who want to identify as boys, or even change gender, but MtF is not what is going on here!!

I can’t believe the tone of much of the BTL. We’re talking about desperate children so abused by mass numbers of skum sex abusers that they seek to swap to another sex and there just seems a general shrug and high falutin’ talk centred on the trans debate. The Mussie grooming gang skum need hanging – the lot of them. I would vote in an instant for that to happen and damn the consequences. To imagine what these girls and boys go through and the sheer incompetence makes any downstream issues irrelevant in my book. There’s most likely a link, duh. We’ve not had the reckoning yet that warrants moving past the mass grooming scandal and into these “intellectual” circle jerks that many seem to engage in BTL. I fervently pray for the very worst to happen to all those that did, do, or ignore & just shrug off what has happened in not just Blackpool but across the whole UK and elsewhere in Europe. Send them back would be option 2: option 1 for me is hang ‘em and make it painfully slow. My heart aches at how pathetic this country now is. And yea they do have somewhere to go back too cos they ain’t Us

Political desperation – militant socialists (and their far-libertarian foes) use any means to their end. Their one true ideology justifies it. “Genderism” = hate = damage. These people want to damage and replace existing social structures. Child sexual exploitation is for them a price worth paying. There are equivalents at the other end of the spectrum – gun ownership and free speech rights. Its acually quite easy to expose the intellectual paucity of these ideologies Governments and their permittted media seem afraid to do so. EG: How to we test these “one true ideologies”? How can there be more that one? Will they work in the year 4000? Did they work 4000BC? etc. Their ethical deficit is easily shown by comparison with societies where the rule of law holds sway. Sadly this nonsene hides the very few gender dismorphic souls. The far-lefts’ co-option of their harms leaves them worse off than before their cause was hijacked.

I’m wondering if abused boys also start to question their gender identity. It would certainly make sense if they dissociate from being male.

Great piece. Bayswater Support Group has a very useful graphic that goes well with it.
https://www.bayswatersupport.org.uk/iceberg/

Julie can appear one-dimensional in her thinking about men but this is a superb article and a perfect example of how confused young people try to deny their gender … not flock to the other one. Pushed away rather than pulled toward. I have known young women who were abused and their route to rejection of their burgeoning womanhood was Anorexia Nervosa.

I just came here to say how wonderful Unherd is, for publishing this and other articles that lay out the issues coherently. Am presently in Canada and if I had to rely on Canadian press I’d be a zombie. Apart from Quillette the Canadian media is fully captured by the woke brigade. It’s incredibly frustrating.

If one were to look further back, towards the roots of this tragedy, one often finds unwanted offspring born to incapable single mothers. The “care” system attempts to provide the least worst adolescence for them. But even the best care is often an inadequate substitute for a stable home with 2 loving parents. It is hardly surprising that these poor children crave love and affection and are easy prey for manipulative criminals. Surely our policies could better address some of the root causes and reduce the numbers of unwanted children.

Meanwhile we have the Transmaxx crowd transitioning from male to male-but-presenting-as-female in order to take advantage of the easier life afforded to females.

Both the article and comments are utterly depressing. Where to start! Men are responsible for so much harm and I know there are good ones out there but their contribution to so much that is wrong in society is overwhelming.

Yawn …another article on gender politics .. give it a rest Unherd, there are other things going on in the world as well.