Meanwhile, other people on the internet, with strange pseudonyms and even stranger avatars, processed the news and footage in a rather different way: they liked it. This is because they thought Kirk deserved to be murdered — because of who he was, what he had said and how he lived. Their joy was a righteous joy and they didn’t feel embarrassed about sharing it. And if they showed any empathy, it was towards Kirk’s murderer, who, in their eyes, had done the world a favor.

Many of these people, judging by their social media profiles and other obvious tells, were from the liberal Left, where justifying or excusing violence against the powerful or the “oppressor class” has a long and shameful pedigree. But a good number came from two fringe communities that on the face of it would appear to have little in common: incels (i.e. sexually frustrated men who self-identify as “involuntary celibate”) and trans women. I know this because last week I spent the best part of a day trawling through their respective online echo-chambers to see what they were saying about Kirk’s murder.

One of these forums is estimated to have more than 20,000 active members. Here, incels share their personal testimonies and vent. The news of Kirk’s death provoked a chorus of celebration: “Rest in Piss bitch,” wrote one poster. “I feel kind of happy to hear this news and see this video,” chimed in another. “Good, death to all normies,” read yet another post. Soon enough, a consensus had solidified, which was that Kirk’s murder was a good thing because he was a normal person — a “normoid” — who had a wife and children. “Not a single drop of empathy for a 6’3 MTN [mid-tier normie] neurotypical IQ mogger with wife and kids,” read one post. Mogger, for those who aren’t familiar with internet incel slang, refers to a male who, by virtue of their physical attractiveness or rhetorical skills, threatens the masculinity of other men lacking in those traits, while “mid-tier normie” refers to a moderately attractive male. “Agreed,” noted one poster, “he was a normie sex haver.” In other words, Kirk deserved to die because he had the sort of life that incels vehemently desire but are unable to achieve.

In many posts, a narrative had formed: they (the normies) hate us (the incels) and want us dead: so fuck them. For example: “Just because troons [trans-identifying people] hate him [Kirk] as well won’t make me change my opinion… He would’ve bullied me to my death. I celebrate the death of normscums.”

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Some incels had more specific reasons for celebrating Kirk’s murder, mainly to do with his support for Israel and their own raging anti-Semitism and misogyny. “He was a gynocentric constantly talking about protecting white foids [women],” thundered one poster. “He was a zionist dog,” fumed another.” One self-avowed accelerationist (i.e. someone who agitates for the demise of liberal capitalist society) excitedly wondered whether Kirk’s murder would spark a wider civil war leading to societal collapse and anarchy.

This is not to say that there were no dissenting voices on the forum. There was one, who valiantly pleaded: “Whatever the disagreement you and others had with him [Kirk] over his support for Israel, this kind of violence is not the solution. We can’t lose our humanity.” This post drew precisely zero responses.

The same perverted logic that classifies Kirk’s murder as a justifiable punishment was similarly rampant across the trans women online forum I visited. It is a forum where thousands of posters share personal stories and vent about their troubles in much the same way incels do. Many posters responded to the news of Kirk’s murder with unbridled glee, not by saying anything but by posting GIFs. One showed a man smoking a cigar, with the caption “Rest in piss you won’t be missed”. Another showed Jeremy Clarkson sardonically mouthing the words “Oh no! Anyway.”

Most posters, though, were more forthcoming. One asked: “Anyone else suddenly feeling in a good mood?” Another responded: “I’m celebrating too. I did a little dance. I sang ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ And I had a couple of tequila shots.” Others were more measured, clarifying that what they were celebrating was not Kirk’s death, exactly, but rather, in the words of one post, “the prevention of future harmful and hateful actions/effects to society that his death represents”. This was a persistent theme in many of the hundreds of posts I came across: that Kirk constituted an existential threat to trans people and thus deserved not a shred of empathy. “I feel sorry for his family,” one poster wrote, “but this guy was a piece of shit. For years, he advocated violence against transgender people, insinuating he was going to kill us.” Others were even more scathing: “He wasn’t a person. Just a Nazi in human skin.”

A few responded to the news of Kirk’s murder by expressing alarm at how it would rebound on them. “My concern,” said one, “is that MAGA/GOP will use this as another dog whistle to eradicate us.” Another confided that while they were thrilled to hear the news of Kirk’s death, this feeling was attenuated by the “fear that the government will use this as an excuse to harm us”.

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Not all of the posts on the trans forums I documented were unhinged. On the contrary, some were decent: “I find this terrifying and sad,” one confided. It continued: “Obviously we all here completely disagree with Charlie Kirk’s beliefs in a deeply profound way… But political violence has no place in a democracy and it speaks to a sickness within our democracies.” Nevertheless, such sentiments were either ignored or ridiculed by many others. “It [violence] has a place. Utah!,” replied one poster to the above plea for common decency and humanity.

On deeper reflection, the similarities between the two forums shouldn’t be so surprising, for there are many striking parallels between these two subcultures. Both incels and trans women have experienced a profound sense of personal crisis and frustration due to perceived problems with the bodies they inhabit — whether, in the case of incels, because the body is experienced as physically unattractive or, in the case or trans women, because it is at odds with how they see their “true” gender identity. Both have come to believe that mainstream society is conspiratorially ranged against them and threatens their very existence. Both, at the extremes, celebrate or condone violence against their enemies. Both dehumanize certain kinds of women and exhibit blatant misogyny towards them: “Stacys” and “Terfs” respectively. Both suffer from high rates of depression and self-harm. And both have provoked moral panics. Indeed, incels are to liberals what trans people are to the Right: namely, a threat to their most sacred values. Where trans people threaten the sanctity of the male-female distinction, incels threaten gender equality.

The other parallel that stands out is that violence associated with these two subcultures is exceedingly rare when compared to other kinds of political violence. According to one well-cited academic study on incels, incel-related violence has claimed the lives of nearly 50 victims globally. This is 50 too many, but is vastly overshadowed by, for example, the menace of jihadi terrorism, which in Western Europe alone has caused the deaths of over 650 people since 1994, injuring well over 5000 more. Levels of trans-related lethal violence are considerably lower, although solid data is still lacking on this. Understanding why there is so little incel and trans violence, given the inflammatory rhetoric that both groups engage in, would be a useful area of future research. (The evolutionary psychologists William Costello and David Buss have gone some way towards explaining this in respect to incels, tentatively speculating that sustained exposure to online pornography, gaming and shit-posting has a sedative effect on incels.)

I have written before about the moral panic over incels and how the response to them has been so disproportionately excessive among liberals and in the media. I would caution against the same over-reaction to trans culture, which seems to be provoking similar levels of derangement on the Right. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take the threat of trans violence seriously, but overstating the extent of their violence is wrong and will further inflame their persecution fantasies and militant rhetoric.

Kirk’s murder is an outrage and should be condemned in the severest terms. But it also offers a fascinating mirror onto our rapidly evolving extremist landscape, where fringe online communities with radically different aims converge in a ghoulish embrace of puerility and the dehumanization of anyone who doesn’t think like them.

We should expose these communities to censure and even ridicule. We should also strive to better understand why and how they come to think in such dangerously binary ways. But we shouldn’t bewitch ourselves into thinking that they are more powerful than they are, much less start trading in the same paranoid and apocalyptic language so beloved of the extremists at the edge.

BeLonG To is far from alone. Across Ireland, trans activist groups such as Trans Equality Network Ireland (TENI) and Rosa International have taken over a movement that used to serve lesbians and gay men. Since the Gender Recognition Act of 2015, a new orthodoxy has emerged. At Trinity College, Dublin, where the student union president is an infamous trans activist, students have driven campaigns to deplatform speakers, boycott events, and label gender-critical views as hate speech. Meanwhile, when it comes to women’s rights such as reproductive health and protection from male violence, Ireland continues to lag behind most of Europe.

Thankfully, an energetic new movement is forming. In Dublin, a group of mostly working-class twenty-somethings, including Annaïg Birdy, are taking a stand. Founded by three lesbians, two bisexual women and four gay men, Not All Gays (NAG) believe that today’s LGBT movement no longer speaks for them and that the government uses the movement to push through laws without scrutiny, like hate speech legislation, that would see people like them be criminally investigated. Their championing of sex-based rights, freedom of speech and ethical boundaries around surrogacy puts them at odds with the current activist dogma.

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I meet them on the eve of the holy month of Pride. Not that this is a typical Pride crowd — most NAG members have been excluded from LGBT charities, events at universities, and Pride. They’re hosting LGB Interrupted, Ireland’s first lesbian, gay and bisexual-led conference. Birdy tells me that NAG decided not to publicly advertise the event’s venue, fearing the usual angry protests if word got out that the Terfs were daring to gather. Sure enough, as I arrived, the organisers were frantically looking for a new sound system. Theirs had apparently been stolen overnight. “It has to be sabotage,” one organiser told me. “Maybe they” — NAG’s enemies — “realize how bad it looks picketing in public, but either way there’s plenty of people who didn’t want this event to go ahead.”

Seán Atkinson, the vice-president and co-founder of NAG, used to identify as non-binary and used they/them pronouns. But he began to question gender ideology after he saw lesbians “facing the cotton ceiling backlash”: that is, they were expected to date transwomen. Atkinson realized that “gay men were not under anywhere near the same pressure to date trans men”. Other members experienced similar awakenings. Monica, a researcher and project leader, was a liberal feminist in her teenage years before she saw the need for LGB to separate from the T. Kylie, a gay man, attended BeLonG To in the 2000s, but turned against gender ideology because of what women, especially lesbians, were dealing with.

While critical of the progressive movement, many NAG members still identify as on the Left. “I’m a femme lesbian — Left-of-center, atheist, pro-choice, anti-racist Terf,” Birdy tells me. But one of her best friends is a gender non-conforming gay man who is Catholic and economically conservative and “just as committed to protecting women and children” as Birdy herself. “We are proof,” she says, “that being same-sex attracted doesn’t come with a political party membership.”

What unites these members is not an ideology but reality. “Sex-based rights are not arbitrary or archaic issues, they are absolutely vital, particularly for women and girls,” says Birdy. “And the freedom to dissent from the gender narrative is now more important to defend than ever before.”

I find it fascinating that NAG are rejecting not just gender ideology but a number of other shibboleths. It’s very rare for young queer people to reject the libertarian “sex work is work” take on prostitution, or to critique commercial surrogacy. But NAG is a unique voice in a chorus of queer activists.

One of the issues the group is disturbed by is how lesbian and group youth are being sexually exploited in the name of liberation. There’s much talk at the conference of drug-fueled sex parties, resulting in what have become known as “chemsex” deaths. A recent report shows that use among gay men in Ireland is on the increase, and I heard from several at the conference that weekend-long chemsex-fueled parties are as common as clubbing.

“You will hear repeatedly, and this is the sad thing, almost all these gay men are going to parties where they’re using highly dissociative drugs, looking for brotherhood, connection, friendship, community,” said panelist Robbie Travers, a young gay Irish activist, “and young women are beginning to die in chemsex parties, which is a total shift.”

In recent years, sexually transmitted infections such as hepatitis, gonorrhea and HIV are on the rise among gay men. And yet, as Travers pointed out, to even mention safe sex or drug misuse is usually met with accusations of homophobia. “It’s gay culture!” is often the cry in response. All of this is being done in our name.

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A similarly contentious issue is surrogacy. Between 33-40% of those who use a surrogate are same-sex couples, with supporters describing gay male couples as “infertile”. Surrogacy in Ireland is unregulated, which means it is neither explicitly legal nor illegal. At LGB Interrupted, it was the subject of fierce criticism. One of the speakers was Olivia Maurel, who was born via surrogacy and is now the spokesperson for the Declaration of Casablanca, a global appeal to abolish surrogacy in all its forms. She calls surrogacy “a violation of human dignity, of women’s rights, and especially of children’s rights”.

“I was conceived through a contract that stated clearly that the woman who carried me, birthed me and bonded with me for nine months would not be my mother,” Maurel told the conference. “Adoption requires accountability,” she said. “Surrogacy requires only money.” Adoption and fostering rates are at an all-time low among lesbian and gay people, despite the fact that many of us campaigned for years in order to have the legal right to adopt and foster.

Since the Gay Liberation Front, founded in 1970, there have been significant improvements for gay people: the right to civil partnerships and marriage, to foster and adopt children in same-sex couples, and protection from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. Even the church and other religious institutions have accepted that we exist. But since trans activism became the dominant force, things have gone backwards. Surrogacy is now replacing adoption and fostering for gay men, lesbians are seen as bigots unless we swear our allegiance to the trans flag, and despite the terrible legacy of the AIDS crisis, gay men are being cajoled back into risk-taking hedonism and disregard for safe sex. These issues are “not Left-wing or Right-wing concerns,” says Birdy. “They are human-rights issues that transcend party lines.”

Lesbian and gay sexual activity was only decriminalized in 1993. Already many of the positive changes of the past three decades have been rolled back thanks to the dominance of transgender ideology. But this new generation, exemplified by Not All Gays, brings new hope.

Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organization For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones.

Additionally, no matter what his personal confusion over identity, he does not get to count as a “lesbian”, and nor does he get to gatecrash designated lesbian-only social events or dating pools. (This last finding was of particular delight to me, since the organization I co-direct with Julie Bindel, The Lesbian Project, was one of a number of “lesbian interveners” in the Supreme Court case.)

This judgment was a humiliating failure for certain members of the Scottish government past and present, not least the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. The ministers’ position, that Equality Act protections for sex and sexual orientation pertained to “certificated” sex, rather than biological sex, was said by judges to exhibit “incoherence and absurdity” — a description which, to seasoned observers of SNP-related gender fiascos, seemed altogether too kind. But the result was also a wider defeat for the US transactivist movement as a whole: the end of a campaign so catastrophically overreaching and self-owning that it has to be up there with Operation Barbarossa.

Around 10 years ago, most organizations didn’t think twice about the relation between the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, and were prepared to turn a blind eye to both men and women with GRCs using the facilities and services of the opposite sex. Given the small numbers of trans-identified people making use of this privilege, and the fact that many of these people exhibited medically-induced physical changes, the general public was none the wiser, and most wouldn’t have cared if they had been. But then transactivist organizations had the brilliant idea of pushing for a shiny new prize called “self-ID”. Any man with surging feelings of inner girlhood should count as a woman for all legal purposes, and vice versa for any woman in touch with her inner man. All of a sudden, there was supposedly no need for any certificate at all, and certainly no previous encounter with any doctor.

If one of the now-burgeoning numbers of trans-identified people did want a GRC, they should get one automatically, without professional oversight — or so a nationwide transactivist campaign, backed by every major political party, proclaimed. But even if they chose not to get a GRC at all, they still had the right to walk into whichever single-sex space or service they pleased, on the basis of however they felt that day. As a result of this piece of strategic brilliance, widely enacted on the advice of Stonewall by thousands of supine institutions, self-ID is now dead as a political project. What’s more, the complete irrelevance of GRCs in relation to single-sex protections has been legally established with maximum publicity.

Like a military historian reviewing the mistakes of wartime generals, we might ask: where did it all go wrong? One big problem was the abilities of the generals themselves. Under Ruth Hunt, Stonewall unilaterally embraced self-ID while still purporting to advocate for LGB people, ushering in what became known as its “no debate” era (as in: “Transwomen are women, no debate!”). In 2019, Hunt apparently gave the self-interested game away to the Guardian: “It’s about treating people as they want to be treated, and when it causes no disadvantage to me whatsoever, who am I to challenge it?”. Next at the helm was statistician Nancy Kelley, perhaps best remembered for likening lesbians to “sexual racists” for their failure to feel attraction towards men professing womanhood, although there was a notorious Census-related balls-up too.

Meanwhile over at Mermaids, the nation’s foremost charity for transitioning children, then-boss Susie Green was busy falsely telling already anxious young people that Mermaids’ critics hated them and wanted them to die. On her watch, there was a series of scandals and tactical missteps, including a disastrous legal attempt to get the LGB Alliance’s charity status removed. This was immediately followed by an embarrassing Charity Commission investigation into Mermaids itself. Green is now reduced to co-directing an “online telehealth service” selling “gender affirming care” including puberty blockers; while her former close associate Dr Helen Webberley is on TikTok, making videos about the supposed ongoing “ethnic cleansing” of trans-identified people, using footage of Auschwitz as a backdrop.

Aside from these personnel issues at the top, another big problem for transactivist campaigners was the restricted arsenal of argumentative weapons at their disposal. They couldn’t rely on reason or evidence as these concepts are commonly understood, because no good arguments for transubstantiation by means of lip gloss existed. This left only three options: intellectual misdirection, emotional blackmail, and aggressively shaming opponents into silence.

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The result of the first of these was fancy-sounding obfuscation about spectrums, social constructs, and the supposedly close relation between trans-identified and so-called intersex people. But this was only ever likely to work with the young or dull-witted, while cleverer minds watched and learned from the mistakes. Equally, as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain heartrending fictions about the unique vulnerability of the trans-identified cohort as a whole. Over and over again, men claiming womanhood kept featuring as perpetrators in court reports. So that left only the tactic of terrifying critics into silence. We on the gender-critical and sex-realist side were called harpies, transphobes, bigots, Christian nationalists, National Socialists, and white supremacists; and that was just by Guardian writers.

At first, the ludicrous name-calling hurt quite a lot, particularly when it seemed those around you were in danger of believing the hype. But after endless mechanical repetition, the words start to bounce off. At that point, you have removed all the fuel from your opponents’ rhetorical flamethrowers, and no attempt to shame you in public is ever going to work again.

In other words: thanks to opponents’ heavy-handed tactics, an army of highly motivated and competent women emerged. These women could no longer be cowed or controlled by the fear of having their reputations destroyed. And even worse for their opponents, despite all the bullying, many proud inhabitants of Rainy Fascist Terf Island maintained an irreverent sense of humor, something nobody has ever said about British transactivists with a straight face.

After self-ID started to affect the Highgate Women’s Pond in 2018, an intrepid group known as “Man Friday” wore fake mustaches and beards to swim in the Men’s Pond. When David Lammy called us “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding rights”, activist Kellie-Jay Keen brought dinosaur costumes to protests. The passing of Scotland’s shameful Gender Recognition Reform Bill was met with horror from onlookers in the parliamentary chamber, but campaigner Elaine Miller defiantly highlighted its sponsors’ moral indecency by flashing a fake pubic wig. And while many hilarious placards and posters have been seen at protests over the years, my personal favorites were also Scottish ones: “No laddies in the ladies” and “Yer daw is not yer maw”.

So, while the other side most definitely had all the gender identities, our side had more tangible assets in the shape of brains, guts, and heart. Given the damage done by Sturgeon to the cause of women and girls north of the border, it is fitting that the biggest victory in the gender wars should belong to members of that esteemed company, the women who wouldn’t wheesht. In the former First Minister, we are given a perfect encapsulation of the tongue-clucking, eye-rolling, mostly performative feminist attitude favored by women in the progressive establishment. But thanks to For Women Scotland and their many grassroots allies, we have been given the real thing.

Gradually, though, my feminist friends and collaborators came to embrace the word, finding it rather amusing. And responding with humour always diminishes something’s power. We would organise “Terf drinks”, and named a London restaurant we regularly meet in “Terf HQ”. On occasion, when we need to assemble over a particular issue, such as the recent Supreme Court case to decide “what is a woman’ in law, we hold Terf Nato.

For me, for my allies, Terf has come to mean something we should all take pride in: an appreciation for the truth, and for biological reality, and a concern for the safety of women and girls.

So when I spotted a four-week online course entitled: “Feminists Against Women: the Politics of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism”, taught by Sophie Lewis, I found myself tempted — compelled, even — to enrol. In the blurb it promised to tell me: What is a Terf? Even more tantalising would be to discover “What makes Terfs tick?” As a proud Terf of 20 years standing, I should know. For me it’s a Negroni, the Godfather trilogy, and a decent meal in Terf HQ.

Even more exciting, I discovered, was my inclusion in the course: “we will read a spread of excerpts from the past 45 years of transphobic feminism, including Material Girls by Kathleen Stock and Feminism for Women by Julie Bindel”.

It’s not the first time I’ve been the subject of a course. My work on the global sex trade, in particular my book from 2017 on the topic, is often cited by pro-prostitution academics as a “bad take” on what they refer to as “sex work”, and I have often amused myself by reading the inaccurate guff they spout about me. But this is the first time I’ve ever signed up to participate, choosing to attend incognito.

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Hosted by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, this is an organisation that runs such courses as “From Racial Capitalism to Prison Abolitionism” and “On the Actuarial Self, and the Crisis of Zionist Feminism”. And if that speaks to the institute’s ultra-radical leanings, Lewis herself is of a similar bent. A visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a freelance writer, her forthcoming book is (predictably) billed as “an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th-century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th-century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists”.

She brought a similar energy to the course which she had convened to help people involved in the trans liberation struggle to “know the enemy”. It’s typical rhetoric for the gender wars in the US where they are fought between rabid trans activists on one side and reactionary conservatives who “know what a woman is”. Unlike here in the UK, it is rare that Left-wing feminists are heard and as a result, few points have been scored against the trans cabal. The course, presumably, was an attempt to shore up her allegedly feminist argument against us.

She certainly has form in that respect. Back in 2019 I read her essay in The New York Times, “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans”, a hit-piece on Terfs, she has devoted plenty of time casting aspersions on me and Kathleen regarding our views on all kind of issues – but mainly gender. We had even featured her in an item on our podcast. Kathleen had discovered a piece Lewis had written about her wedding, held in a cemetery. “How do you square your advocacy for… abolition of the family,” she had written, “with your decision to marry and cohabit exclusively with a spouse?” Good question — and one the article comprehensively failed to answer.

And so I logged on to Terf school with low expectations. As for the poor dears who had to attend alongside me, they were warned they would have to contend with some tricky opinions — ones that run counter to their firmly held beliefs. Hence the obligatory trigger warning; mine and Kathleen’s work “should be considered to carry a giant content warning for transphobia — often misogynistic, specifically, transmisogynistic, generally queerphobic, and sometimes eliminationist tropes”.

Sounds exciting. But even I was unprepared for the 12 hours of turgid neo-Marxist hyperbole I was ultimately exposed to. I’d like to tell you what we were supposed to be learning about, but it was mostly incomprehensible nonsense about how Terfs are quasi-fascists, and how our ideas are based on antisemitism, colonialism, racism and every other -ism you can think of.

I was disappointed my work could be “skipped over”. Given that I feature quite prominently in both the course publicity and the reading materials, I did wonder whether she had cottoned on to the fact that I was in her virtual classroom. Nonetheless, Lewis was considerate enough to include a PDF of both mine and Kathleen’s books for students to read without having to buy them. Kath’s work was described as “crushingly evil”. Other feminists were similarly dismissed. Discussing The Transsexual Empire, a groundbreaking 1979 work by Janice Raymond — the original Terf — Lewis repeats old tropes about her supposed bigotry, even claiming Raymond hoped to annihilate the whole trans community.

Lewis also seemed unable to genuinely counter other of Raymond’s assertions, breezily suggesting she’d “never seen” trans communities use terms like “front” or “back” hole. That’s news to me: one cancer charity last year announced that “bonus hole” is an acceptable alternative to vagina, a word that can apparently “cause someone to feel hurt or distressed”. These terms have been in use as far back as 2018 in “safe sex” guides for trans identified people. It is a well-documented fact that trans activists have been bullying midwives in the UK into using “chest-feeding”, “human milk”, “strapless”, and “girl dick”. But why let a good fact get in the way of your preaching?

Just as tellingly, not everyone received such short shrift: Lewis approvingly quoted Jacob Breslow, even though he’d claimed children can be “the object of our attraction” during a 2011 pro-paedophile conference. Not to worry, though: Breslow, a former trustee of Mermaids, is still a credible Terf-busting source. In his journal article, “They Would Have Transitioned Me”, he suggests that any Terf saying that “all it takes today to get sent down the gender clinic is to be gender non-conforming” can only be secretly envious of those who did get to transition. He then uses this to target two women he is not keen on — namely Stella O’Malley and J.K. Rowling. Both women were inevitably also in Lewis’s sights over the course.

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More telling, perhaps, is what the course didn’t touch on. There was not one mention of the male Terfs, such as Graham Linehan, Matt Walsh, or Simon Fanshawe. How interesting Lewis was only interested in taking out the women, the same women who have been responsible for setting up women-only services for victims and survivors of men’s violence, the ones she refers to as fascist enemies. In short, transgender ideology, including when promoted by women, is nothing short of misogyny.

The irony here is that by completely ignoring the real, tangible and positive change for women and girls that we Terfs have affected in our struggle over the years, Lewis completely fails to recognise, let alone teach, what it is that makes Terfs tick.

In pursuing this outcome, Stonewall has resurrected a set of complaints about the equality watchdog that it first co-authored with Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project and sent to GANHRI last year. In a lawyer’s letter also made public at the time, the two organisations claimed that there had been various murky political appointments of EHRC Commissioners “broadly supportive” of government, which had then produced a lack of “pluralism” in the organisation. As a result of these and other perceived infractions, it was claimed that the EHRC now insufficiently complied with the Paris Principles, first formulated in 1993 and described by GANHRI as the “minimum standards” a national human rights organisation must meet “in order to be considered credible and to operate effectively”.

This first attempt at forcing a special review failed; but this week it emerged that, in May, along with 29 other transactivist organisations, Stonewall once again complained to GANHRI and this time succeeded. The new ingredient appeared to be an explicit allegation that the EHRC’s recent attempts to make some women-only spaces genuinely single-sex — disingenuously described by Stonewall as seeking “to enable greater exclusion of trans women” — are “actively harming trans people”. Like thousands of organisations and individuals before them, when faced with the magic words “exclusion” and “trans women” in some combination, GANHRI appears to have succumbed immediately, without much reflection on why physical exclusion of males from a place where women undress, sleep, or play sport might be perfectly justified.

Stonewall bosses are probably now wondering why they didn’t cut to the chase sooner. Certainly, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that their pique at the EHRC’s rejection of the transactivist position on single-sex spaces was the reason behind such superficially high-minded interventions all along. If they really cared about the upholding of the Paris Principles and the knock-on effects for the rights of LGBT people, one assumes they might also have had something critical to say about the fact that GANHRI has awarded coveted A-list status to such homosexual havens as Qatar (where gay sex is illegal, and potentially a capital offence); Indonesia (where gay sex is illegal under Sharia law in one province, and frowned upon everywhere else); and Egypt (where gay sex is de facto criminalised under morality laws).

Instead, GANHRI is now operating psychically for Stonewall as the latest saintly supranational authority figure to be appealed to without question; no doubt pictured by its employees as standing shoulder-to-shoulder beside them in their ongoing battle with whichever nasty bigoted haters are currently standing in the organisation’s way. And this is quite amusing — because historically, Stonewall used to think of both the Conservative government and the EHRC as playing precisely that authority figure role for them at a national level. In fact, when it comes to cheek-by-jowl relationships between human rights organisations and UK government, Stonewall wrote the playbook.

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This, after all, is the organisation that became accustomed to seeing Home Secretaries speak at its award ceremonies; ministers and committee chairs mindlessly parroting its campaign objectives; and government departments vying for top spot in its Workplace awards scheme. In that light, then, we should read Stonewall’s complaint to GANHRI not so much as motivated by a genuine concern for liberal neutrality in human rights organisations, but more like the vengeful retribution of a jilted lover, trying to cause problems for an ex’s new relationship by complaining vociferously to the ex’s mum.

This charity didn’t seem to care about the close relationship between the UK government and the EHRC as long as it was able to give orders to both. For a good while, it seems that it had the run of the EHRC in particular. The chair of that organisation from 2016-2020 was David Isaac, a former chair of Stonewall appointed by Conservative minister Nicky Morgan. This was an appointment criticised at the time for the fact that Isaac’s law firm Pinsent Masons was the recipient of millions of pounds worth of contracts from the government, thereby potentially reducing the EHRC’s ability to hold them to account. It is also clear from FOI requests that the relationship between Stonewall and the EHRC both during and after Isaac’s tenure was extremely chummy, with Stonewall assuming they could review EHRC documents before publication and instructing its office-holders to officially adopt their policy on self-ID. The EHRC was also a Stonewall Diversity Champion until 2021, which in practice means that it would have received every piece of campaign propaganda going, with the usual expectation that it would all be effortlessly ingested and then regurgitated.

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In sum: for Stonewall to have the effrontery to complain to GANHRI about a “lack of political independence” demonstrates as much brass neck as you would expect from the very same organisation that, in 2022, petulantly withdrew at the last minute from partnering the Government in a major international conference on global LGBT human rights — thereby ensuring that the conference, and any resultant progress, could not happen at all — simply because the Government would not endorse their preferred stance on criminalising talking therapy for gender-confused teens. As is so often the case, Stonewall officials have apparently redefined a familiar phrase to mean its exact opposite. In future, when they complain about a lack of political independence, the reader should probably understand that the institution in question has finally found the balls to become politically independent from them.

And it also seems that Stonewall bosses have an idiosyncratic understanding of certain other keywords from GANHRI’s Paris Principles. At one point, the Principles state that a national human rights body should demonstrate “pluralism” in the sense of ensuring an adequate reflection of the “social forces (of civilian society) involved in the promotion and protection of human rights”. Indeed, this seems an eminently reasonable requirement. Yet Stonewall complains in its letter to GANHRI that there is a lack of pluralism at the EHRC, apparently on the grounds that some EHRC Commissioners “adhere to regressive views… out of step with the vast majority of equality and human rights bodies”. Quite obviously, these two things are not equivalent.

Leaving aside the tendentious use of “regressive”, spouting the latest fashionable social justice-speak in lockstep with every other mainstream equality organisation is clearly not the same as reflecting a healthy diversity of thought about the adjudication and balancing of human rights. In their original complaint, Stonewall and the Good Law Project presented examples of what they apparently thought were manifestly heinous opinions expressed by recently appointed EHRC office-holders: a reference to the Chair Baroness Falkner’s alleged “gender-critical” views; David Goodhart’s statement that complaints about systemic racism are “statistically naïve” and his belief that “white self-interest is not the same thing as racism”; and Jessica Butcher’s claim that “feminism, like other forms of identity politics, has become obsessed with female victimhood”. Such thoughts were presented by the complainants as if the mere statement of such heresies demonstrated the thesis that the EHRC was insufficiently pluralist — but of course they do precisely the opposite.

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What Stonewall and other scions of the modern charity-industrial complex seem to have lost sight of is the basic philosophical point that human rights and their relations to other morality claims are not identified and listed like cells under a microscope, but are essentially contested. Even if you believe there are such things as natural rights, you still have to think hard about what exactly those are, and how best to protect them in practice. Meanwhile, if you think of rights as in any way socially constructed — and presumably they must be, since LGBT groups keep discovering new ones every five minutes — then, given their political currency, it follows that you can’t leave special interest groups to dominate conversations about them. Viewed in this light, the views of Falkner, Goodhart, Butcher and others about the meaning and consequences of rights claims are not extraneous to pluralist discourse about rights but are an essential part of it.

Of course, it is not in the interests of those at Stonewall to acknowledge such complexity. Admitting they might not have the last word on how to assess rights claims on behalf of trans people, wherever these compete with claims from other groups, would go against their simple but highly effective business model to date (roughly: transwomen 10; actual women 0). What we really need, then, is a national equalities watchdog, pluralistic enough in composition that it can effectively do this for them. And thank goodness, it looks like we finally might have one.

One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion boasts that he wouldn’t let an ambulance through if he was blocking the road, even at the cost of a patient’s life.

A biological male with criminal convictions for kidnap and attempted murder says at a Trans Pride rally: “If you see a Terf, punch them in the fucking face.” The crowd, holding placards about love, kindness and human rights, cheer and applaud.

Students at California State University glorify a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel to slaughter the innocent, while Harvard students write an open letter blaming Jews for their own execution. They grieve the “slow and sudden” deaths of Palestinians.

Acts of kindness bear witness to our shared suffering. But when kindness becomes pathological, it is cruel and divisive — as with these examples. And it is on the rise. In the West today, there are people whose suffering is deemed to be non-existent or of little value, and so judgement takes the place of understanding, punishment that of mercy. The result is a purity spiral whereby extreme kindness towards an in-group gives unlimited licence to act with cruelty towards an out-group. It’s this licence that gives progressive activists permission to clothe antisemitism as anti-colonialism.

Following the Hamas massacre, a lecturer at Stanford University used “identity-based targeting” to force three Jewish students to stand in a corner so they could feel “what Israel does to Palestinians”. He asked them how many Jews died in the Holocaust. One of the students said “six million” and the lecturer replied that “colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer”. In New York, activists tore down posters pleading for the safe release of Jewish hostages, many of them women and children, while London saw a 1,353% increase in antisemitic attacks.

In the intersectional narrative inhaled by activists, kindness for the “oppressed” legitimises unspeakable cruelty against the “oppressor”. For normal people, whose instincts are not numbed by ideology, the dissonance of cruelty clothed in kindness is disorientating. In 2021, Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, challenged use of the phrase “birthing person” to describe a pregnant woman. Fellow birthing professionals denounced her — in the name of kindness. As the attacks intensified and the language became increasingly violent, Milli lost her sense of reality, telling an interviewer: “Am I the person I think I am? Do I have this dark side that’s violent and hateful and toxic and all the things they say I am?”

Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski, who spent his early life under Nazi occupation, analysed the political and psychological processes that generate this loss of reality. He called it ponerology, or the “the study of the origin of evil”. Collaborating, in secret, with a number of dissidents in post-war communist Poland, he sought to explain the “pathological inversion of a normal social hierarchy” in which “psychological deviants” take power and create a “pathocracy…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people”.

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This minority is the “pathological underbelly” present in every society, about 6% of the population, of which a tenth are psychopathic — characterised by grandiosity, narcissism, personal charisma, impaired moral and psychological reasoning, a systemic incapacity for self-criticism and the sadistic pursuit of pleasure. Under communist rule, Lobaczewski witnessed such people, riven with mediocrity and oblivious to their incompetence, become leading members of the party. As their grip on power tightened, one malignancy bred another, until academics, scientists and psychologists succumbed to communist ideology. They acted as if in possession “of some secret knowledge; in their eyes we became their former colleagues, still believing what the ‘professors of old’ had taught us”.

From Mao’s attack on the Four Olds — old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture — to the assault by critical race theorists on the universalism of the civil rights movement and the sublimation of antisemitism into support for Hamas atrocities, a defining factor of pathocracies is historical amnesia and psychological naievety. This allows for the separation of the “Old” from the “New”, and the metastatic transformation of what Lobaczewski called the “pathological underbelly” of society into the ruling elite.

In the West, progressive activists are denying their cultural dominance, despite using this dominance to shame, de-bank and destroy their enemies. They compete for status by aligning themselves with intersectional destitution to manufacture a world in which discrimination, inequality and climate deaths are increasing, when the evidence shows the opposite is true. Ultimately, elite pathocrats become totally isolated from the world of normal people. Their language becomes esoteric and they speak only to each other. The Polish philosopher Angnieszka Kolakowska described this descent into unintelligibility among Communist Party members as a defence mechanism: when they “feel cornered, they automatically lapse into textbook communist jargon”, she wrote. “Their words simply fail to refer and the result is gibberish.”

Gibberish, in the mouths of elite pathocrats, becomes wisdom, creating a utopia of nonsense, detectable in sentences like this, from the activist Rosa Lee: “By remembering the metaphorical character of any scientific model, we can draw out the insights of the theory of performativity while putting it into conversation with our other Marxist metaphors.” The end point is “communisation, the transition to new communist selves”. The mystique of this language cements the separation of ideology from reality and pathological elites from the “normal man”. Faced with struggle sessions, shaming, bullying and violence — and fearing for their sanity — normal people lapse into silence, unable to comprehend the pathocratic trauma unleashed upon them. When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration.

When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration. Such a spectacle is a source of pleasure to the dominant elites for whom “forcing others…to feel and think like themselves becomes an internal necessity, a ruling concept”. This “necessity” can never be satiated. No level of deindustrialisation can cleanse the West of its “abuse” of Mother Earth, no ritualistic recitation of pronouns can redeem the “sins of the cis” and no atonement can ever be sufficient to repay the debt owed by the Jews for their “crimes”.

This impossibility of salvation makes sadism eternal.

This process is viscerally described in Juliette, a novel written by the Marquis de Sade. In it, the eponymous heroine meets Pope Pius VI and demands that he offer up a dissertation on murder. The Pope obliges, arguing that to commit murder is in accordance with Nature:

“from time immemorial, man has taken pleasure in shedding the blood of his fellow man and to content himself he has sometimes disguised this passion under a cloak of justice, sometimes under one of religion. But, and of this let there be no doubt, his purpose, his aim has always been the astonishing pleasure killing procures him.”

Ideology, in other words, is used to conceal the sadistic desires of the libertines, to legitimise the raw exercise of power. Normal, virtuous people are imprisoned, tortured, brutalised and killed by aristocrats, priests and popes — purely for the pleasure of it.

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Pathocrats who seek the collapse of open societies do everything they can to conceal the “astonishing pleasure” they get from having the power to punish. They do so by redefining concepts like “justice”, “safety” and “kindness” in a language accessible only to the elite. Like contemporary identitarian progressives, Sade’s libertines speak only to each other. This enables them to hide the sadistic psychology that drives them.

And because it is impossible to prove that people are thinking “correctly”, the elite’s desire can never be satisfied. Pathocrats and libertines cannot be appeased. In a futile attempt to appease her attackers, Milli Hill offered her online platform to a Bame birthing expert. For this, her accusers amplified her guilt by adding racism to the accusation of transphobia. They shamed her for not paying the Bame woman for her work, and accused her of being a “white saviour”. The simple fact of Hill’s continued existence was an irresistible invitation to degrade her further. But still, they cloaked their cruelty in the language of kindness. Lacking the courage of the Sadean libertine, her tormentors clung to their progressive ideology, for fear, as Lobaczewski observed, that without it “nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive”.

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It’s that nakedness we see when a mob is implored to “punch a fucking Terf” or a Hamas terrorist decapitates a dying Jew with a garden hoe. Yet those who raise their fists in support are, without doubt, on “the right side of history” — that is, the winning side. Pathocrats almost always win, the few silencing the many, because it’s easier to be kind than to love.

If we are to survive this cruelty in the name of kindness, we need to separate what’s benign and beautiful in progressive ideologies from the pathological underbelly that’s overwhelmed them. We need to salvage tolerance and inclusion for all trans people from the attack on science and single-sex spaces undertaken in their name. We need to rescue the universalism of the civil rights movement from an anti-racism that reverses the terms of a malevolent racial hierarchy in the name of justice. We need to protect present and future generations from the consequences of environmental degradation without sacrificing the poor to gratify an apocalyptic vanity. And we need to seek justice for Palestinians without glorifying unspeakable violence.

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Lobaczewski concluded that normal people protest against pathocrats “from the depths of their own souls and their human nature”. They protest against the evisceration of their language, the denigration of their values and the unjustified status of the elites who govern them. If we allow pathocrats to control our institutions and corporations, the future will #BeKind.

We must remember that it’s their weakness, not their strength, that compels the pathocrats to silence dissent. As the anti-apartheid campaigner Nadine Gordimer wrote: “No social system in which a tiny minority must govern without consent over a vast majority can afford to submit any part of control of communication.” To break their power means isolating the minority within the minority from the decent people who have become cruel out of fear, contagion and opportunism. In this struggle, we’ll find unexpected allies.

Having been one of the last prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed in July 1789, the Marquis de Sade later found himself in the improbable position of a revolutionary judge. When the family of his estranged wife, responsible for his long years of incarceration, were brought before him for judgement, he chose mercy and spared them from the guillotine, saying: “Such is the revenge I take upon them.”

The answer, it seems, lies in a shift in the global HIV response, one that the United Nations hopes will finally “end Aids by 2030”. To push HIV out of the “crisis” stage, in which it has been stuck for decades, and shrink the rate of new infections, health practitioners want a massive roll-out of the preventative medications that are no longer protected by drug company patents or exclusivities. And they want to target that specific sub-population that is disproportionately affected by HIV: transwomen who have sex with men.

In parts of the world, trans prostitutes are up to 80 times more likely than anyone else to be HIV-positive. It is estimated, for example, that in Brazil, as many as a third of travestis — male prostitutes with a female identity — are HIV-positive. Elsewhere, hijra, kathoeys and waria — names used in different cultures for males who adopt female names, clothing, hairstyles and pronouns — are a significant concern for health officials, since they are tricky to monitor and tend to have risky sex with men who often have a female partner at home.

To encourage these at-risk individuals to take part in HIV testing and treatment programmes, global health experts want to offer them a form of integrated care, which could include hormones, reassignment surgery referrals, and other “affirming” services alongside PrEP. As a study in The Journal of the International Aids Society made clear as far back as 2016: in scaling up PrEP for trans women, it is essential to engage trans communities, utilise trans-inclusive research and marketing strategies and identify and/or train healthcare providers to provide gender-affirming healthcare to trans women.”

In India, for instance, a recent white paper detailed a scheme to incentivise hijra and “transgender persons” to take part in HIV screening that involves a comprehensive package of services including gender-affirming care. In Thailand, one programme found that kathoeys were more likely to show up to clinics if they were staffed by transwomen — inspiring trials of similar initiatives in the Philippines, Myanmar and Nepal. It is a strategy that has been adopted in the developed West, too, albeit one that lacks transparency. In 2021, the US Department of Health and Human Services ordered HIV clinics to start offering “gender-affirming care” — a move celebrated in March this year, when the White House made clear that the federal government’s strategy “to end the HIV epidemic” included providing “access to gender affirming care and treatment services to transgender and gender diverse individuals with HIV”.

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It is not unusual for health authorities to group services together, or incentivise individuals to make healthy choices. But we have known for at least two decades that transwomen are inordinately at risk of being exposed to HIV. As long ago as 2009, doctors in community clinics in California reported that the availability of hormones and other affirming care would make trans patients more likely to show up to clinics for prevention.

The shift in attention may be down to the fact that, in recent years, with lesbian and gay equality effectively secured in much of the West, LGBT organisations have started to champion transgender causes. But it may also be down to the fact that, in some countries, HIV transmission is beginning to occur at a faster rate among heterosexuals than gay and bisexual men. And this is perhaps in part due to a subsection of heterosexuals, who have transwomen as partners.

Gynandromorphophilia was first coined in 1984 to describe the sexual preferences of ostensibly heterosexual men who are also attracted to males with exaggerated female features, such as big breasts, hips and lips. Gynandromorphophilic males (or Gamps for short) play a role in the transmission of HIV to the general population because their sexual relations with these often high-risk men put their own female partners at risk, which can also result in the virus being passed to unborn babies. We know, too, that heterosexuals tend to be diagnosed late, once their immune system has already been compromised. This also applies to their female partners, who might never suspect that they have been exposed.

In 1995, when Belgian virologist Peter Piot was entrusted with leading the global Aids response at UNAids, it didn’t take him long to realise that stigma relating to sex was the real barrier to ending the epidemic. Shaming “people with diverse sexuality”, Piot said, forces them into the shadows and keeps the virus in circulation.

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In an effort to address the estimated 4,500 undiagnosed HIV cases in the UK and halt the virus, the NHS now recommends that certain at-risk groups “may benefit” from taking the now widely and freely available PrEP medication. These at-risk groups include “trans or non-binary person [who] are regularly having condomless sex”. And with this group, “gender-affirming” incentives will increasingly be a part of that medicalising strategy.

While there is an urgent and noble objective here — the eradication of HIV — my worry is that it is taking place without any serious public debate about the consequences. With so much still unknown about the effects of transitioning, gender-affirming therapy is being made more accessible. And at what cost? Only when the HIV epidemic finally ends, will it become clear how subtly it has reshaped the world it’s left behind.

Kennedy, who is 69 years old, recently shared videos of himself lifting weights and doing press-ups shirtless. Alongside these, he pledged that should he become President, he will “restore America as the global example of health and well-being. Not through pills or syringes, but through character and self-discipline.”

The idea that physical and moral vigour go together is ancient. The first Olympic Games were held nearly three millennia ago, around 776BC, and many athletic-looking Greek statues survive to this day that vividly celebrate male physical beauty and strength as shorthand for good character.

This association persisted. In his 1855 poem “I Sing The Body Electric”, Walt Whitman celebrated human beauty as a fusion of character and embodiment, where flesh and gesture “are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul”. According to Whitman, the “well-made man” expresses his character in both body and movement — all of which offers a clue as to character.

But fusing beauty and value lands differently today. The modern progressive mainstream has set itself firmly against the idea that our bodies say anything moral. Kennedy’s videos prompted a flurry of accusations that in showing off his muscular torso, he’s mired in toxic masculinity, dog-whistling body fascism and eugenics, and implicitly promoting discrimination against disabled people. And – perhaps most damningly of all for someone who promotes natural health – that he’s faking it: of using unnatural means to pump his muscles when in reality he’s old and weak.

Kennedy has not responded to the rumours about steroid use. But the argument hits a live and divisive issue on the Right: biotech. A significant chunk of his support comes from a cluster of emerging popular movements whose common theme is resistance to “unnatural” biotech innovations. He was a prominent opponent of Covid vaccine mandates, one such innovation; other issues in the same cluster include medical gender transition, and artificial meat – all of which inspire strong opposition as unacceptable incursions of technology into our nature.

So we might ask: how can Kennedy advocate health and wellbeing via character and self-discipline, and show off his ripped physique to underline the point, if he attained that physique with the help of synthetic hormones? It’s a fair question. But the collective shrug from Kennedy supporters suggests that what was gleefully pointed out as an inconsistency — an advocate of “natural” health possibly using medical tech to attain that health — is not, in fact, seen as contradictory in the slightest.

We take the opposition between tech and nature for granted today — not least because we’ve spent two centuries using tech to escape the limits of nature, and told ourselves this was a story of moral progress. This forms the backdrop — among other things — to the women’s movement, a story that wouldn’t have been possible without a host of now near-invisible technologies that underwrite women’s relative autonomy.

Beyond this, it forms the backdrop to progressivism in general. It’s not just women who now seek to escape the idea that our bodies say something about us: it’s everyone. From the disability rights movement to “body positivity”, the driving idea is that any judgement or constraint imposed by our contingent physical form should be challenged. Perhaps the logical endpoint of this challenge has been gender medicine’s all-out resistance to embodied limits, a politics that’s centrally about “pills and syringes” as liberation.

This utopian drive to break the bounds of human nature, then, began in earnest with the industrial era. As the world modernised, technology and a Protestant work ethic were applied not just to escaping our limits, but also to resisting our waning strength as physical work became less important. With the freshly-minted Land of the Free roaring from agrarian colonial backwater into industrial superpower, new anxieties proliferated about health, vitality and masculinity. In response, a “muscular Christianity” emerged which framed manly fitness as an expression of religious devotion — and whose many legacies include the still wildly popular sport of American football.

But it wasn’t just the Christians. As industrialisation made life easier and people richer and freer, so this new wealth and leisure drove an explosion in social and cultural experimentation in how to live well. In this free-for-all, a dizzying array of health entrepreneurs flourished, offering “water cures”, physiology lectures, anti-masturbation campaigns, sanatoria, and diets and lifestyles of such experimental weirdness, they make our 21st-century keto diets, NoFap forums and jade yoni eggs look positively normie.

Even Walt Whitman contributed to this emerging culture. Just three years after “I Sing The Body Electric” was published, he wrote a 13-instalment guide to Manly Health and Training in a New York newspaper, under the pseudonym “Mose Velsor”. In it, he sets out the intimate link between physical fitness, moral virtue — and also personal efficacy and performance. Training doesn’t just deliver a “perfect physique” but also helps a man “exalt the intensity of his personal force” — a transformation that will, in turn, “attract to him attention, friendship and respect”.

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This mania for self-improvement tracked the wider transition in American culture, from largely agrarian to increasingly wealthy, entrepreneurial and technologically advanced. To succeed in this new era, the ambitious man had to grind. In other words, the fitness culture that emerged with modernity serves as a mirror of the machine age that spawned it: a “body electric” for the age of electrification, in which our physical forms become sites of industry-like labour and competition.

Today, we live in a biotech age, in which our flesh appears less in Whitmanesque terms — as union of body and soul — than as organs for donation; DNA for re-writing; a uterus for rent. We are raw material for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

With this new turn has come another round of dematerialisation. Work is not just de-sexed, but virtualised. Life is sedentary. Happiness, risk-free sex, even weight management or the appearance of the opposite sex can be obtained in a pill or syringe. There’s no pressing reason to attain any level of physical fitness, except personal desire. And on top of these disintegrating forces, the dominant culture has also set itself (at least overtly) to the dissolution of physiological norms.

And just as industrial technologies spawned egalitarian challenges to our limits, and also new cults of the body beautiful, so today’s biotech age of hormone-enhanced affirmation and “inclusive” body culture has also given rise to a countervailing one, of aggressive physical beauty. One influential aspect of this backlash is a Right-wing subculture of bodybuilding, whose proponents oppose the progressive war on human nature along every possible axis. In general, adherents embrace effortful self-improvement, vitality and individual excellence, while dismissing “body positivity” and egalitarianism of every kind. Centrally, the RWBBs embrace the link expressed so controversially by Kennedy between physical health and moral worth — especially what health implies about individual effort and discipline.

Perhaps the most influential figure in this movement is the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, whose Bronze Age Mindset decries egalitarianism as the attempt to abolish excellence and natural hierarchy in favour of meaningless “buglife”. His social media account abounds with “Handsome Thursday” images of honed male physiques, presented as aesthetic resistance to such levelling-down.

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Unlike the 19th-century “muscular Christians”, this 21st-century fitness subculture draws inspiration more from the Hellenistic ancients, especially their sculptures of athletes. This affinity is so closely held that when a historian recently suggested ancient Greek soldiers would have been lean and tough, rather than “ripped”, he was deluged with furious anons, who accused him of self-interestedly attempting to legitimise “dad bods” and emasculation, and undermine men’s aspiration to physical beauty and strength, and — implicitly — to the superior character such beauty and strength have classically been viewed as reflecting.

But when such aspirations are located — as in the contested Greek soldiers — somewhere in the distant past, before the world modernised, what hope does anyone have of holding on to it? Critics sometimes accuse the RWBBs of clinging to a type of masculinity that has simply been rendered obsolete by changing social conditions. And maybe there’s something to that idea. Even “I Sing The Body Electric” expresses a palpable sense of loss at disappearing physical cultures: Whitman eulogises an agrarian grandfather hunting, boating and fishing with his many sons and grandsons. Hale and tan, loved by all, overwhelmingly magnetic, he’s a compelling figure – and was written in an era when that version of America was already disappearing.

Today, much as in the 19th century, we’re embroiled both in a tech-enabled war on human nature and a defence of that nature that is also tech-enabled — not least in how extremely online it is. But one upshot of this entanglement is that it might not, after all, be such a gotcha for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be using testosterone replacement therapy to pursue the body beautiful.

Right-wing body-builders and their fellow travellers may decry the use of synthetic hormones for anti-normative ends, such as “transgender” medical interventions for children. But there’s far more ambivalence where it comes to using biotech to enhance human beauty and performance. For example, there’s no clear consensus in this community on whether using anabolic steroids is OK. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if even those who criticise the use of tech to wage war on our nature might be less troubled about using tech to give nature a helping hand. After all, there’s no going back even to the 19th century, let alone the world of the hale, tanned farmers Whitman eulogises – or indeed of Greek hoplites. And, in theory at least, technology and desire can be turned to ends other than flattening every physical difference between individuals.

So perhaps this is the best we can hope for: diverting our “pills and syringes” from waging war on our nature, toward wielding them in support of human health and beauty. It’s a risky path, with many pitfalls. But with no obvious route back to a supposedly “natural” state, it may be that the only way out is through.

Critics adored her. “Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary,” enthused Roger Ebert. “I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.” Juno won her an Oscar nomination for best actress. But it wasn’t craft alone that made Page so appealing. It was also something about her as a person — as a girl. In a period when the dominant mode of female celebrity was the “trainwreck”, Page was different. She was big-eyed and skinny, but she didn’t party. She didn’t cycle through boyfriends. She didn’t drink-drive. You never, ever saw her falling out of a club — or out of her clothes. 

“If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends,” wrote Helen Pidd. “Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong).”

Page’s peers were quizzed about their sex lives and their scandals. Page talked about politics and feminism. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools,” she told Pidd. “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?”

Still, Page wasn’t unscathed by the gossip machine. The very fact that she didn’t date, and did dress like a tomboy, raised a whole other set of questions: was she (whisper it) a lesbian? “Is Juno a you know?” asked an article in the Village Voice. Ellen DeGeneres had successfully negotiated coming out in 1997, but she’d done so as the beloved lead of a hit sitcom. Page was only just getting established, and a preference for flannel shirts was hardly compatible with the part of the rising starlet.

It took till 2014 — when Page was 26 — for her to declare her sexuality publicly. “I am tired of lying by omission,” she said in a speech to the Human Rights Congress. The scrutiny of her perceived failure at femininity had taken a toll. She told the audience that a website had recently run photos of her in sweatpants, with the question: “Why does this petite beauty insist on dressing like a massive man?” With audible exasperation, she delivered her answer: “Because I like to be comfortable.”

Page seemed, for a while, happy. She wore suits on the red carpet: an adorable baby butch. She got married to choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. And then, in 2020, Page came out again — this time as transgender. “Dressing like a man” had never merely been about comfort, apparently: it had been about actually being a man. 

Page had top surgery — a double mastectomy. In an interview with Time, Page called this “not only life-changing but lifesaving”, and described it as a remedy to the “total hell” of puberty. The public reaction was widely supportive: Netflix immediately announced that it would update the credits on The Umbrella Academy, in which Page stars, to reflect Page’s chosen name. Ellen Page disappeared. Elliot Page emerged instead.

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By Sarah Ditum

In the Time interview, Page said that the journey to identifying as trans started with reading trans people’s memoirs, in particular Becoming a Man by P. Carl. Through identifying with Carl, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.” So it makes sense that Page has now contributed his own volume to the genre — Pageboy, released for this Pride month. “An ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy,” according to the flyleaf. 

But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.

In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.

Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.

Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat. 

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But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all. 

As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.

But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”

Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.

Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

Trauma is a commonplace of trans memoir, or rather, of trans men’s memoirs. Trans women’s memoirs are, for the most part, exuberant narratives of self-actualisation (albeit usually with some background homophobia, similar to Page’s mother’s). Trans men’s memoirs are often wrenching accounts of rape and self-harm, climaxing in irreversible body modification. Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive features a harrowing description of the author as a 10-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by her father (the abuse started when McBee was four). It initiated a “split” between self and body. “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden,” writes McBee, who nonetheless separates his masculine identification from the depersonalisation caused by the abuse. 

Carl (in the book that inspired Page) also relates being sexually assaulted at the age of 11 or 12, also by his father: “You’re becoming a woman. Your breasts are beginning to show. I like watching you change,” Carl recalls him saying. Later, the first stage in Carl’s transition is a double mastectomy. “I feel a fiery rage … for what men did to me,” Carl writes, before adding: “I feel so much joy living in a man’s body.”

For Page, these experiences of rejection and violation are incorporated into a story of latent maleness — or rather, of boyness. As the title suggests, there is little interest in being seen as an adult male. Even his new name, Elliot, is inspired by the boy hero of Spielberg’s E.T. Ceasing to be a woman confers a sort of immunity to time. Carl, who transitions in midlife, is spurred to take action by impending menopause: “I knew menopause, becoming an older woman, would kill me, that menopause would shove my femaleness in my face in a way that would make me too sick to live.”

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In retrospect, the Noughties insistence that Page was different to the other girls could be seen as an excuse to mistreat her peers: by casting them as sluts in contrast to Page’s “good girl” figure, the media could suggest that they deserved what they got. Yet Page received much the same abuse; and her reaction was not entirely different. Rather than responding with public self-destruction, Page redoubled a private war against her own body — now his body. Britney shaved her head; Page removed her breasts; both cut away what gave them away as female. 

It feels a long, sad distance from the woman who once protested that she was entitled to wear whatever made her “comfortable”; longer still from the girl who, back during promo for Juno, spoke up for a woman’s right to be at the centre of her own story. In Pageboy, Page’s girl-self seems passive and tragic: a sleeping beauty, held in suspended animation, afraid to grow up, and kissed without her consent. (There is, I suspect, some retconning here. Achieving a career such as Page’s takes considerable determination, and Page does not suggest this was driven by parental ambition. Yet Page never addresses where this drive to act comes from, or attributes his professional success to more than luck.)

As a “trangender guy”, Page can be Aladdin: the main character, capable of making decisions that affect reality. No more pressure to wear the dress or play the princess. But the fairytale Pageboy reminds me of most of all is the Little Mermaid. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, the mermaid fails to meet the condition of her womanhood. Her suffering ends when she is transformed into one of “the daughters of the air”; finally incorporeal, she makes an impossible, fantastical escape from her betraying body.

On the surface, Pageboy is a euphoric account of Page “finding himself”: the model narrative of the trans memoir. The happy ending is Page waking up in a hospital bed, breastless. Between the lines, though, there’s another story, of a self-hating girl who engineers a flit from femininity. It’s obligatory now to be shocked by the cruelty of Noughties culture. When, I wonder, will we recognise the even greater cruelty of inviting women and girls to barter their body parts for self-determination?

*

Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties is available to pre-order.

But for some reason, this basic principle doesn’t seem to apply to the hyper-politicised subject of gender medicine. On one side, Republican states are attempting to ban youth gender medicine — and, in some cases, to dial back access to adult gender medicine. On the other, liberals maintain that there is solid evidence for these treatments, and that only an ignorant person could suggest otherwise.

Whether or not you agree with the GOP’s stance (I do not), the latter view is simply false. The trajectory of youth gender medicine in nations with nationalised healthcare systems has been relatively straightforward: these countries keep conducting careful reviews of the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones, and they keep finding that there is very little such evidence to speak of. That was the conclusion in Sweden, Finland, the UK, and, most recently, Norway. As a recent headline in The Economist had it: “The evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak.”

Yet despite this evidentiary crisis in Europe, and despite multiple scandals vividly demonstrating the downside of administering these treatments in a careless way, liberal institutions in the US have only become more enthusiastic about them. In recent years, everyone from Jon Stewart and John Oliver to reporters and pundits at the New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR have exaggerated the evidence for these interventions.

The logic seems to be that if activists, doctors and journalists repeat “The evidence is great!” enough times, regardless of whether the evidence actually is great, the controversy will go away — as though the state of Arkansas could be shamed into reversing its policy on trans youth because Jon Stewart made fun of them. Meanwhile, as I can tell you from experience, if you openly question these treatments or highlight just how little we know about them, you’re going to have a bad time.

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But look a little closer, and it swiftly becomes clear that the evidence for both adult and youth gender medicine is frequently drawn from alarmingly low-quality studies. Almost invariably, when you examine the latest study to go viral, there’s much less there than meets the eye — whether because of serious overhyping and questionable statistical choices on the part of the researchers, outright missing data, flawed survey instruments, more missing data, or just generally beyond-broken methods.

Since any individual study or group of studies can suffer from these issues, serious researchers know that you can’t just take a few that point in the right direction and herald them as evidence. Rather, you need to sum up the available evidence while also accounting for its quality. This is what European countries have done, and they have all come to roughly the same conclusion: the evidence supporting these treatments isn’t there.

But even at the level of sweeping summaries, America’s conclusions are often distorted. A prime example came in a recent New York Times column by Marci Bowers, a leading gender surgeon and the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Bowers paints a very rosy picture of the evidence base:

“Decades of medical experience and research since has found that when patients are treated for gender dysphoria, their self-esteem grows and their stress, anxiety, substance use and suicidality decrease. In 2018, Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality released a comprehensive literature review finding that gender transition, including hormones and surgery, ‘improves the well-being of transgender people’. Nathaniel Frank, the project’s director, said that ‘a consensus like this is rare in social science’.

“The Cornell review also found that regret… became even less common as surgical quality and social support improved. All procedures in medicine and surgery inspire some percentage of regret. But a study published in 2021 found that fewer than 1% of those who have received gender-affirming surgery say they regret their decision to do so… A separate analysis of a survey of more than 27,000 transgender and gender-diverse adults found that the vast majority of those who detransition from medical affirming treatment said they did so because of external factors (such as family pressure, financial reasons or a loss of access to care), not because they had been misdiagnosed or their gender identities had changed.”

Here we have a leading expert (Bowers) citing a leading institution (Cornell) and relating astonishing claims (what medical procedure has a 1% regret rate?). The case appears to be closed — until you actually click the links and read Bowers’s sources. (Bowers and WPATH did not return emailed interview requests.)

Let’s start with Cornell’s data. According to a summary at its “What We Know Project“:

“We conducted a systematic literature review of all peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1991 and June 2017 that assess the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being. We identified 55 studies that consist of primary research on this topic, of which 51 (93%) found that gender transition improves the overall well-being of transgender people, while 4 (7%) report mixed or null findings. We found no studies concluding that gender transition causes overall harm.”

If you are familiar with systematic literature reviews, you will find the above unusual. Researchers don’t generally ask whether a procedure works or not in such a vague a manner, then tally up the results. To usefully gauge the level of evidence, a review has to carefully define its research questions, and factor in the potential biases of the existing studies. The Cornell project does none of this.

I emailed Gordon Guyatt, one of the godfathers of the so-called evidence-based medicine movement, to ask him whether he thought the Cornell project qualified as a systematic literature review. His response was: “It meets criteria for a profoundly flawed systematic review!” When we later spoke, he explained why he didn’t trust it. “Presumably, they are trying to make a causal connection between what the patients received and their outcomes,” he said. “That is not possible unless one has a comparator.” In other words, if you’re only tracking people who received a treatment, and don’t compare their outcomes to another group not receiving the treatment, you simply can’t learn that much. Guyatt offers the example of someone taking hormones and saying afterwards that they feel better. “That does not mean that the hormones have anything to do with your feeling good.” 

This is a very basic, very well-understood problem in both medical and social-scientific research. If all you have is before-and-after measurements of how someone who received a treatment changed over time, there are all sorts of potential confounds, from the placebo effect to regression towards the mean to the possibility that receiving the treatment coincided with some other salutary intervention, such as therapy, that wasn’t accounted for.

Because the Cornell team made no effort to even evaluate the risk of bias in the individual studies it evaluated, the final product tells us very little. It’s roughly analogous to coming upon a pile of coins and trying to determine its worth simply by counting how many coins there are, rather than sorting the pile by denomination. When I raised this with Nathaniel Frank, the head of the Cornell project, he said via email that “we don’t publish traditional systematic reviews”, but rather web summaries of important research questions. So the first words of its overview might confuse readers: “We conducted a systematic literature review.” 

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If Bowers had wanted to cite a carefully conducted, peer-reviewed systematic review of the gender medicine literature, she actually had one at her fingertips: her own organisation, WPATH, funded one a few years ago. The results, published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society in 2021, revealed that there is almost no high-quality evidence in this field of medicine. After they summarised every study they could find that met certain quality criteria, and applied Cochrane guidelines to evaluate their quality, the authors could find only low-strength evidence to support the idea that hormones improve quality of life, depression, and anxiety for trans people. Low means, here, that the authors “have limited confidence that the estimate of effect lies close to the true effect for this outcome. The body of evidence has major or numerous deficiencies (or both).” Meanwhile, there wasn’t enough evidence to render any verdict on the quality of the evidence supporting the idea that hormones reduce the risk of death by suicide, which is an exceptionally common claim.

Oddly, though, the authors of this systematic review conclude by writing that the benefits of these treatments “make hormone therapy an essential component of care that promotes the health and well-being of transgender people”. That claim completely clashes with their substantive findings about the quality of the evidence. So, when Bowers cited the Cornell project, she was citing a review that is of very limited evidentiary value — while also ignoring a much more professionally conducted, and much more pessimistic, though strangely concluded, review that her own organisation paid for.

But what about the study which, she claims, “found that fewer than 1% of those who have received gender-affirming surgery say they regret their decision to do so”? Here’s where things get downright weird.

The study in question, published in 2021 in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, has dozens of errors that its nine authors and editors have refused to correct. Indeed, it appears to have been executed and published to such an unprofessional standard that one might ask why it hasn’t been retracted entirely. 

Before we get into all that, though, it’s worth pointing out that even if it had been competently conducted, the review could not have provided us with a reliable estimate of the regret rate following gender-affirming surgery: the studies it meta-analyses are just too weak. Many of those included did not actually contact people who had undergone surgery to ask them if they regretted it; rather, the authors searched medical records for mentions of regret and/or for other evidence of surgical reversals. Yet this method is inevitably going to underestimate the number of regretters, because plenty of people regret a procedure without going through the trouble of either reversing it or informing the doctor who performed it. In one study of detransitioners — albeit one focusing on a fairly small and non-random online sample — three quarters of them said they did not inform their clinicians that they had detransitioned.

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The studies included in this review also failed to follow up with a very large number of patients. The meta-analysis had a total sample size of about 5,600; the largest study, with a sample size of 2,627 — so a little under half the entire sample — had a loss-to-follow-up rate of 36%. If you’re losing track of a third of your patients, you obviously don’t really know how they’re doing and can’t make any strong claims about their regret rates. And yet, the authors don’t mention the loss-to-follow-up issue anywhere in their paper. No version of this meta-analysis, then, was likely to provide a reliable estimate of the regret rate for gender-affirming surgery.

Even so, the version that was published was particularly disastrous. Independent researcher J.L. Cederblom summed it up: “What are these numbers? These are all wrong… And these weren’t even simple one-off errors — instead different tables disagreed with each other. The metaphor that comes to mind is drunk driving.”

To take one example, the authors initially reported that the aforementioned largest paper in their meta-analysis had a sample size of 4,863. But they misread it — the true figure was actually only 2,627. They also misstated other aspects of that report, such as how regret was investigated (they said it was via questionnaire but it was via medical records search) and the age of the sample (they said it included some juveniles, but it did not).

Not all the errors were significant, but they were remarkably numerous. And because of the abundance of issues, the paper attracted the attention of other researchers. “In light of these numerous issues affecting study quality and data analysis, [the authors’] conclusion that ‘our study has shown a very low percentage of regret in TGNB population after GAS’ is, in our opinion, unsupported and potentially inaccurate,” wrote two critics, Pablo Expósito-Campos and Roberto D’Angelo, in a letter to the editor that the journal subsequently published. In her own letter, the researcher Susan Bewley highlighted what appears to be an absence of vital information about the authors’ method of putting together the meta-analysis. 

The authors and the editors decided to simply not correct any of this. They did publish an erratum, in which they republished seven tables that still contained errors, while maintaining that all those errors had no impact on the paper’s takeaway findings. But the paper itself remains published, in its original form, complete with those 2,200 ghost-patients inflating the sample size.

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Bewley and Cederblom have continued to ask the journal to reveal the process that led to the paper getting published, and to address why so many of the errors remain uncorrected. In an email in January to Bewley, Aaron Weinstein, its editorial director, claimed that because critical letters to the editor had been published, and because the corrected data was reanalysed by a statistical expert, “the Publisher and the ASPS [American Society of Plastic Surgeons] feel that PRS Global Open has done due diligence on this article and this case is closed”. He also claimed, curiously, that he had no power to force the authors to address the many serious remaining questions raised by the paper’s critics, saying “there is no precedent for an editorial office to do so”. Neither Weinstein nor the paper’s corresponding author, Oscar Manrique, responded to my emailed requests for comments.

Finally, there is Bowers’s claim that “a separate analysis of a survey of more than 27,000 transgender and gender-diverse adults found that the vast majority of those who detransition from medical affirming treatment said they did so because of external factors”. This is technically true, but is also rather misleading because the survey in question — the 2015 United States Transgender Survey (which has profound sampling issues) — was of currently transgender people. It says so in the first sentence of the executive summary. Research based on this survey obviously can’t provide us with any reliable information about why people detransition, because it is not a survey of detransitioners. If you want to know how often people detransition, you need to follow large groups of trans people over time and check in to see if they still identify that way later on — and we don’t have high-quality research on that front.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of studies being discussed here concern adults, while the legislative discussion mostly centres on adolescents. The most recent version of WPATH’s Standards of Care is very open about the lack of evidence when it comes to the latter: “Despite the slowly growing body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of early medical intervention, the number of studies is still low, and there are few outcome studies that follow youth into adulthood. Therefore, a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” Again, WPATH is Bowers’s own organisation — surely she is familiar with its output?

Despite the backbreaking errors of that nine-authored paper, the severe limitations of the Cornell review, and the near-utter-irrelevance of the United States Transgender Survey, all three are chronically trotted out as evidence that we know transgender medicine is profoundly helpful, or that detransition or regret are rare — or both. It’s frustrating enough that these lacklustre arguments are constantly made on social media, where all too many people get their scientific information. But what’s worse is that many journalists have perpetuated this sad state of affairs. A cursory Google search will reveal that these three works have been treated as solid evidence by the Associated Press, Slate, Slate again, The Daily Beast, Scientific American and other outlets. The NYT, meanwhile, further publicised Cornell’s half-baked systematic review by giving Nathaniel Frank a whole column to tout its misleading findings back in 2018.

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By Jesse Singal

Why does such low-quality work slip through? The answer is straightforward: because it appears, if you don’t read it too closely, or if you are unfamiliar with the basic concepts of evidence-based medicine, to support the liberal view that these treatments are wonderful and shouldn’t be questioned, let alone banned. That’s enough for most people, who are less concerned with whether what they are sharing is accurate than whether it can help with ongoing, high-stakes political fights. 

But you’re not being a good ally to trans people if you disseminate shoddy evidence about medicine they might seek. Whatever happens in the red states seeking to ban these treatments, transgender people need to make difficult healthcare choices, many of which can be ruinously expensive. And yet, if you call for the same standards to be applied to gender medicine that are applied to antidepressants, you’ll likely be told you don’t care about trans people.

As Gordon Guyatt, who has done an enormous amount to increase the evidentiary standards of the medical establishment, told me: “You’re doing harm to transgender people if you don’t question the evidence. I believe that people making any health decisions should know about what the best evidence is, and what the quality of evidence is. So by pretending things are not the way they are — I don’t see how you’re not harming people.”

For many women though, both in the UK and elsewhere, things are very different. Whether in Uganda, where same-sex encounters are a criminal offence, in Iran, where some lesbians have been threatened with state execution, or within the religious enclaves that exist in a number of US states and in which lesbian conversion therapy is widespread, being a lesbian can mean a hard, lonely life. I am keenly aware that 45 years after coming out, and despite decades of campaigning for lesbian rights, much remains to be done before lesbians can feel truly liberated. Which is why, with Kathleen Stock and Martina Navratilova, I have set up the Lesbian Project. The idea has been brewing for a number of years — ever since I began to realise that the word “lesbian” was yet again becoming a dirty one, as many gay men and trans activists accused us of bigotry for seeking out our own spaces and setting boundaries.

We want to explore why our needs and issues have been so thoroughly deprioritised that we are ignored, presumed indivisible from gay men and heterosexual “queer”-identified kinksters, and even — according to other “letters” of the ever-growing alphabet – the baddies?

The rot started to set in when the Gay Liberation Front split. Lesbians, despite having taken the lead in many ways, soon found that their own concerns were coming second to those of men. Sick of being marginalised and asked to make the tea, after three years the majority of the women walked out and began organising independently. These lesbians had become the stuff of legend by the end of the Seventies. And their struggle for liberation was indivisible from that of women everywhere: one of the seven demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement was “The Right to a Self-Defined Sexuality. An End to Discrimination Against Lesbians”.

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By Kathleen Stock

I was at the first autonomous public lesbian event — the Lesbian Strength March — in London, in 1981, and the exhilaration that my 19-year-old self felt is hard to describe. Back then we understood that the one thing we did have in common with our gay brothers was discrimination on the basis of our same-sex attraction. We also recognised that one common anti-gay trope, namely the suggestion that gay men were not to be trusted around children, was also said of lesbians. But we were also well aware that a number of gay male campaigns, such as those targeting the legal penalties against cottaging and cruising, did not concern us.

Our issues included resisting what the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality. Many of us were feeling coerced into marriage with men. I know I was. As a working-class girl hitting my teens in the mid-Seventies, my life had already been mapped out. I was supposed to marry and have kids with one of the men on my estate, and stay with him regardless of how unhappy or unfulfilled it made me.

At that time, and indeed well into the Eighties, it was commonplace to hear of lesbians who, having split with their husbands, then lost custody of their children through the family courts because they were lesbians. At one stage, up to 80% of the women dragged through the courts by disgruntled ex-husbands lost their children this way. It was clear that the issues affecting lesbians were worlds apart from those affecting gay men.

Coming out as a teenager was not my choice. Every girl at my school was deemed either a lezzer or a slag. And because I had rejected the boys in my class, and was clearly more interested in my female friends, by the bullies’ logic I must be a lezzer, so they stared to call me it. For once, they happened to be right. I was bullied and threatened, until my older brother stepped in. But being a teenaged lesbian was also a joy: going to nightclubs with the gay boys and observing the older butch/femme couples was fascinating.

The Lesbian Project is seeking an amicable divorce from our gay brothers. Being lumped in with men is neither appropriate nor useful when it comes to our priorities, and we can no longer pretend that it is. We have only once been targeted by the same legislation — Section 28 — and as women we need to ask ourselves whether we are being afforded the same attention as our male counterparts.

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The return of lesbian pride

By Julie Bindel

Not that all the issues affecting lesbians are the same. We are not a hegemonic group. If I were cast away on a desert island, with 50 indiscriminately chosen lesbians, we would fight like cat and dog and agree on next to nothing. But we would still share something precious and fundamental: our resistance to the path set out for us by whichever community and nation we were raised in.

There are other things we share. We are all gender nonconforming (despite the fact that prior to queer theory and trans ideology we didn’t ever use that term). We have defied sex stereotypes, and all of us have been major disappointments to those hoping we would grow up looking to marry a handsome, successful man and produce a brace of children. We were supposed to behave differently, even if raised within liberal or socially progressive families. We weren’t supposed to wear scruffy dungarees and play pool in backstreet bars.

Many lesbians will disagree with, even actively dislike, my views on certain issues. Some lesbians won’t be feminist. Others might prefer the term “queer” or “gay” — terms I won’t use to describe myself. But like it or not, we are a tribe. Our enemies are not discerning. We are bound together by our refusal to play by the rules. Every out lesbian has defied sex stereotypes and taken a huge risk in being public. Heterosexuality is not just the norm — it is also the method by which patriarchy flourishes. Whether or not we are conscious of it, lesbians are both a threat and a direct challenge to men’s superiority over women.

Today, I live a privileged, middle-class life, with a media career and a supportive family and friendship circle. Although I am relatively safe from bigotry and violence, I still feel that knot in my stomach when asked by a stranger, “What does your husband do?” Then there are the times I hear direct anti-lesbian sentiments expressed by colleagues, neighbours and others, and I can’t keep quiet. If we can come together to fight the oppression that affects us all, our differences will matter less than they otherwise might. A few weeks ago I was walking my dog in the park when a man, resplendent in tattoos, biker jacket and shaven head, approached me. For a split second, I wondered if he was friend or foe. But as we stood face-to-face, he broke into a big smile, and told me he recognised me “off the telly” and that “my mum loves you! She’s a lesbian too.” I was walking on air for the rest of the day.

Everyone involved in this project has their own history and perspective on what it means to be a lesbian. Joanna Cherry, one of the Scottish National Party’s most high-profile MPs, has been treated appallingly within her own party over her views on single-sex spaces (not just for lesbians but also for women facing domestic and sexual abuse). And Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter turned barrister, has spoken out about biological men identifying as lesbians on online dating apps, for which she was labelled a “bigot” and a “transphobe”.

These women join a long list of those who are fighting back against the new bigotry that has rebranded lesbians as irrelevant or not deserving of attention. Our enemies are the same as when I came out decades ago: misogynists. Above all, men who hate the fact that we reject them sexually and get on just fine without them. Some of our enemies are, unfortunately, young women, although we would never condemn or reject them. Having spoken to dozens of them, I fear these women are motivated by a desire to stay on the right side of the men in the LGBTQ+ rainbow, so they put their own needs aside in order to be accepted. One day they may come to us older lesbians for advice and support. We are here for them if they do.

The Lesbian Project will put us back on the map. Lesbians who are able to be out and proud share bravery, tenacity — and enemies. Whatever our differences, we all want things to be better for future generations of girls. Being a lesbian is to refuse to bow to convention. It is an act of resistance and resilience. And I for one am proud to use that label.

During her address to journalists, the First Minister’s well-honed rhetorical abilities cast their usual spell — broken only during the Q&A, when she was asked about her legacy of a collapsing NHS, widening attainment gaps in literacy and numeracy in schools, and soaring numbers of drug deaths every year. Before that, though, we were firmly in Sturgeonland, where — a bit like being on a Highland distillery tour — reality tends to disappear in a euphoric haze and temporarily everything looks better than it actually is.

Despite plummeting personal approval ratings, she focused several times on consoling those who, she assumed, would be saddened by her departure, giving the impression of trying to avert outpourings of weeping in the streets. Putting an optimistic gloss on the general mediocrity of her party, she implied that for too long she had eclipsed the many talented SNP politicians with her own brilliance, promising that from now on we would be able to see them more clearly. And perhaps most startlingly — fresh from calling critics of her government’s gender law reforms “homophobic” and “racist” only a fortnight ago  —  she noted that, over the years, she had somehow become a lightning rod for “irrationality” in the “tone and tenor of discourse” on controversial areas, and expressed the fervent desire that things be less polarised from now on.

All of this must have been quite enraging for one of the few actually talented individuals left in the SNP, Joanna Cherry. Cherry is well-known for disagreeing with the party line on gender law reform in favour of self-identification, arguing that it will harm women’s and lesbians’ rights. In 2021, on the same day that an SNP supporter sent her violent sexualised threats for which he was later convicted, Cherry was sacked from her Westminster front-bench role, apparently for her opposition to self-ID. You don’t get much more “intensity” and “brutality” in politics than that.

Equally, Sturgeon’s new turn as a pacifist in the culture wars must have been hard for Joan McAlpine to hear. She was a highly successful MSP for a decade, but was viciously ostracised in 2019 for expressing reservations about the conflation of sex and gender identity in the Scottish Census. She was eventually pushed out of politics via a gerrymandered party rule change that some suspected was deliberately designed to oust her.

Sturgeon did nothing at the time to reduce toxicity in the party with respect to Cherry and McAlpine, even when SNP MPs were openly describing the pair as hateful for views about self-ID which — it now turns out — most of the Scottish population share. Quite the contrary: she frequently turned the heat up, via the regular delivery of public statements of support for transactivist causes that could easily be read as green lights for others to carry on smearing. Right up until the moment a fortnight ago when the First Minister was left havering on ITV about whether Isla Bryson is or is not a woman, she tended to present any dissent towards the “trans women are women” mantra as the product of confused or malicious thinking. When a headteacher publicly sides with the school bullies, she might as well have declared open season on their victims.

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It was also Sturgeon’s government that funded one of the main engines of transactivist insanity in Scotland and the UK more generally, the Scottish Trans Alliance (now Scottish Trans). Effectively, they paid this organisation and its parent charity, Equality Network, to tell them what to think on trans issues, and then obediently did exactly what they were told — including pushing for self-ID, and dismissing all objections to it as hateful.

In 2016, then-director James Morton told the Women and Equalities Select Committee that rape crisis and domestic violence services for women should admit males self-identifying as women, and should work to “educate” any traumatised female service-users who complained — a point that was uncritically incorporated into committee’s final report. And in 2018, Morton wrote about how his government-funded organisation had deliberately influenced the Scottish Prison Service to introduce males into female prisons, reasoning that introducing self-ID in these “very challenging circumstances” would put pressure on other public services to adopt it too. And — factually at least, though not ethically — he was right.

So, for Sturgeon to pose at the press conference on Wednesday as some kind of throwback to the Scottish Enlightenment, urging that “debates should be rational” and that “Scotland should be capable of having them”, may well count as the most brass-necked reverse ferret of her long career. She is certainly no Thomas Reid or Dugald Stewart, two 18th-century philosophers closely associated with the Scottish school of common-sense realism, and who each emphasised the importance of trusting one’s senses and guarding against paradox. For the policy of self-ID is manifestly a failure on both counts.

Never mind that — despite an apparently shared interest in witch-burning, Sturgeon doesn’t even reach the fairly low bar for public rationality set by Presbyterian founder and general miserabilist John Knox. Knox may have been fond of ducking-stools, stocks, and pillories, but at least he thought that people should interpret biblical texts for themselves, without the interposition of priests in funny robes spouting incomprehensible jargon.

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Partly thanks to Knox and the high levels of literacy he encouraged in schoolchildren for Bible-reading purposes, Scottish culture has a long and justly famed tradition of valuing independent thinking. There is a rejection of closed hierarchies of power, and a habit of nose-thumbing authority figures. Outward appearances of prestige are supposed to mean little, and the lowliest and poorest member of society is thought equal to the most powerful and well-connected. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” Robert Burns famously told us. “Trans women are women,” piped the incongruent refrain from Sturgeon. To prove it, she put violent, unstable murderers and paedophiles into close living arrangements with impoverished, abused females. And then she left them to get on with it.

Politicians are generally good at rewriting history. In the general Great Forgetting which, I assume, will follow the eventual Great Resetting on gender policies towards something more sensible, the SNP may well feign collective amnesia about their former glorious leader’s role in helping discourse in Scotland on trans matters become as vicious and divided as it could possibly be. For all I know, Sturgeon might be about to announce her appointment as a Visiting Professor of Public Reason at Strathclyde Uni, or something. Stranger things have happened. So just in case — and as the woman herself might say — let me be very clear.

Over the course of her leadership, Sturgeon has presided over a closed system of mutual backscratching between her government and favoured courtier-transactivists, paying them to tell her and her government what to think. She has helped shut down free and lawful public discussion of their demands, enabled the unjust monstering of their critics, and sat silently watching as eminently capable women in her own party suffer unconscionable bullying and smearing from others within the party for dissenting.

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Even worse, while posing as both feminist and socialist, she monomaniacally has put the vested interests of a small group of privileged, university-educated activists over the interests of huge swathes of ordinary Scottish women, including many who are vulnerable and traumatised by violence and sexual abuse. And she has apparently done this for what she foolishly believed would be political gain.

Nicola Sturgeon may well be — in fact, obviously is — a human being. But she’s a hypocritical and callous one. She’s right to say that Scottish politics has become more intense and brutal, but she only has herself to blame.

Despite being marginalised crones on the fringes of society, witches are having a moment. For several years, we’ve been hearing of their resurgence as “a symbol of feminist empowerment”. From young women casting spells against Donald Trump to British Vogue producing a “Guide to Being a Modern Witch”, now is the time for us to wield our wands against the patriarchy — or, failing that, a beleaguered female author will do. And 2023, we are told, is set to be the Year of “Witch Lit”, with novels such as Emilia Hart’s Weyward and Margaret Meyer’s The Witching Tide hitting the shelves.

In many ways, I am in favour of this. Not only am I a huge fan of dark stories about powerful women, but my own forthcoming non-fiction book, exploring the demonisation of middle-aged women, bears the title Hags. The witch has long been an important figure for feminists, capturing the relationship between women’s vilification, our otherness, and our strength. In the words of Kristen J. Sollée, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists, she’s “a martyr mascot for the women’s movement”.

And yet, I’m not convinced by some of the qualities — moral purity, stylised rebellion — that seem most important to some of those who champion her today. Real witches don’t win the applause of Bafta audiences. Women who are truly hated, truly marginalised, might be role models in the sense that they teach us what it means to be an outsider, but they are not aspirational. In Women & Power, Mary Beard argues that fetishising the female monster is a poor substitute for challenging the forces that keep her in place: “despite the well-known feminist attempts over the last 50 years or more to reclaim Medusa for female power (‘laughing with Medusa’, as the title of one recent collection of essays put it) — not to mention the use of her as the Versace logo — it has not made a blind bit of difference to the way she has been used in attacks on female politicians”.

In my own writing, I am more interested in looking at the dynamics of misogyny, witch-hunting and demonisation than in “reclaiming” witch as an identity open to all. I just don’t think it works that way. What worries me about treating the witch as “one of us” — someone on our side, representative of our values, proof of our anti-establishment credentials — is that it prizes the external trappings of “witchiness” over a meaningful analysis of what might make a woman a witch today. At its extreme, the former becomes a substitute for the latter.

Through the witch — in fiction and fashion — you can engage in a kind of fantasy feminism, role-playing standing up to the mob. In this sense, “Witch Lit” corresponds to a psychological need that cannot be met in the real world, where fear of rejection and ostracism tempers rebellious urges. By making it fashionable to immerse yourself in stories where women go against social norms, becoming ugly, aggressive and dangerous, you create a paradox: a woman can use the witch not as provocation, but to signal her conformity. It’s a way of ticking off feminism’s “bad woman” objective without inconveniencing others, the literary woman’s equivalent of wearing a Girls Just Want To Have Fun(damental Rights) t-shirt.

It’s not that I don’t think fiction writers are producing some wonderful, highly intelligent work on the topic of witches and witch hunts. My issue is with where it sits in the context of feminism and publishing at this particular point in time. For instance, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies is a brilliant study of the way in which a self-sufficient, female-centred community is rendered sinister under patriarchy’s gaze, with members eventually turning on its most outspoken member as a way to save themselves. It’s based on events on the Norwegian island of Vardø in the early 1600s. Nonetheless, the Guardian describes it as “a witch-hunt tale for our times”.

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One of the most striking scenes involves the main protagonist, Maren, feeling compelled to participate in the condemnation of a woman who has been her friend: “Maren watches as the word [witch] ripples around the assembled women like a current… She watches, betrayal thumping its drum in her chest as Kirsten is bound at the wrists and led in the direction of Vardøhus.” Reading it, one feels dismay at Maren’s betrayal, but also senses that, in her place, we’d have done the same. It’s testimony to Hargrave’s skill and empathy as a writer that she doesn’t go down the easy route of focusing on heroic victimhood. She makes you understand the compromises. It is, absolutely, relevant to our times, if perhaps in more ways than the Guardian may have considered.

There are many behaviours I notice, in both feminism and publishing, which replicate the dynamics of the witch hunt. Accuse a woman — older, outspoken, perhaps too independent for your liking — of a ludicrous crime, such as causing crops to fail, bewitching your cattle, wanting to commit genocide or denying your right to exist. Vilify women who congregate without the presence of male guardians. Subject these women to punishments which rely on spectacle, then trust that the punishment itself will convince others of the validity of the original accusation. Create a climate of fear, so that other women will be afraid to assert themselves, perhaps even encouraged to point the finger at others to deflect attention from themselves.

In 2020, the year The Mercies was published, Hargrave refused to sit on a judging panel for Mslexia until the older novelist Amanda Craig stepped down. This was because Craig had signed an open letter in support of J.K. Rowling, who was receiving a torrent of death and rape threats — punishment as spectacle — for having had the temerity to express her own views on sex and gender. Rowling was being accused, ludicrously, of wanting others dead, and Craig, for standing by her, was tainted, too. Having read her novel, I was shocked by Hargrave’s behaviour: it seemed like such a crass replication of the very finger-pointing she’d depicted so well. The younger woman directs the mob towards the older one, like Abigail Williams in Salem, like Jennet Device in Pendle. Like, eventually, Emma Watson in front of the Bafta crowd.

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It was as though because Hargrave had “done” the politics of the witch hunt in fiction, she didn’t need to engage with it in real life. I’m not suggesting that every author has to better the choices made by their own creations, or that they should share the beliefs of J.K. Rowling. But if part of a book’s marketing relies on its moral import and relevance to modern-day feminism, then I think we need to question how far novels which deal with witchcraft and/or female persecution represent an extension of feminist activism — or merely a substitute for it. I’ve nothing against people immersing themselves in stories of “marginalised women with hidden powers, the kind of female traditionally hunted down or isolated”. It should not, however, become a kind of wish fulfilment, a way of easing the conscience, or not having to face it at all.

The witch is not a cool figure. No one gets burned at the stake for being too cool. Once you start claiming you’re here for “all of the witches”, the truth is, you’re here for the mob.

By the time I cross the Forth and then the Tay, everything is changed: not just the passenger accents, or landscape, or weather, or light — but also the train itself. I would swear the carriage somehow shrinks. And time bends too. By the time I arrive at the tiny station and alight to the familiar sound of Arctic geese in the tidal basin right next to the platform, it feels like I’ve travelled, if not to an earlier time, then certainly to a different one.

A coastal town of 12,000 people, where many of my schoolmates found work offshore in the oil industry, I thought of Montrose last week as Sturgeon delivered her conference speech 40 miles up the road in Aberdeen. Among her key messages was the announcement of a new £50 million award to Aberdeen and surrounding areas from a government fund called Just Transition. This was not, as some might have worried given the SNP’s current preoccupations, a forward-thinking plan to make Aberdonians more non-binary, but rather a fund dedicated to helping the North East move away from oil and ultimately to make Aberdeen “the net zero capital of the world”.

As usual with the SNP, pesky details about the fast-changing status of Scottish oil in the face of Europe’s current energy crisis were unacknowledged in favour of a soothingly principled-sounding headline. Other progressive lures in Sturgeon’s speech included strong support for refugees, much lamenting about lost EU membership, and motherly requests that everyone get their Covid booster. There was also the requisite Tory-bashing, anticipated by Sturgeon the day before with her statement: “I detest the Tories and everything they stand for.”

How did this all go down in Montrose? My hometown is probably one of the most SNP-friendly in the country. Even when SNP MPs were few and far between, we had one in Angus for much of my childhood. Many — perhaps even most — people I know there are staunchly pro-independence. And yet, as you might expect in a place where farming, fishing and oil have shaped the economy, and where golf club membership is practically mandatory from birth, the Montrose civic character is quite far from the rainbow flag-waving ecowarrior to whom the SNP seems to want to appeal.

The main rival for the SNP in Angus is not Labour but the Tories, perpetually edged into second place (apart from one brief period in power between 2017-19). Generally, Montrosians are cautious, wry, and not easily impressed with flamboyant gestures — and this includes the few natural Labour voters I know there, who are more into nationalising the railways than taking the knee. It’s true that there are a few blue-haired teenagers around these days, but I assume it’s a bit like back in 1987, when I bought myself a BOY London baseball hat and matching sweatshirt on an intrepid foray to Kensington High Street. Back under the grey skies of Montrose, I looked ridiculous and everyone knew it.

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Down in Holyrood, the SNP continues to pursue its own ludicrously incongruent fashion item — otherwise known as revising the Gender Recognition Act in favour of self-ID. Blithely ignoring the evidenced concerns of many women — famous and not-so-famous — Sturgeon continues to present this policy as a mere bureaucratic formality, sensibly ironing out a few wrinkles in the existing Act in a way that only morally bankrupt deplorables could possibly object to. Actually, though, her Bill proposes that any Scottish man can legally become a woman pretty much whenever he likes, with practically no meaningful strings attached. According to almost any local standard other than the one set by (mostly English) Edinburgh University students, that’s clearly the project of a total bampot.

It cannot be overemphasised how poorly this culturally radical, sense-defying policy fits with the temperament of the average Scot — and not just in Angus. Much of Scotland remains what it has been for decades: family-oriented, communitarian, and socially conservative compared to the average metrosexual liberal type. Scottish people may be economically more Left-wing than UK voters but they aren’t more culturally liberal.

At the moment, the SNP are making much of recent findings from the British Social Attitudes survey suggesting that 52% of the population now back independence; perhaps unsurprisingly, they say less about other social trends indicated in the last few years, suggesting that there are significant qualms about uncontrolled immigration or that support for the death penalty is higher in Scotland than the UK national average. Indeed, this is perhaps what you might expect in a place where local communities are still relatively strong. For there to be insiders, there has to be outsiders.

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But to marvel at this mismatch between SNP luxury beliefs and the more parsimonious sensibilities of voters is to ignore the distorting influence of the biggest and baddest outsider of all: the one just over the border. For, although it has become relatively taboo to say so, whatever the official talk of civic rather than ethnic nationalism, a big motivator for SNP supporters in Scotland is still animosity towards the English. You can’t raise a population on endless stories about bloody historical injustices at the hands of their ethnic neighbours and then expect them to feel irenic. Certainly, I couldn’t fail to be aware of the enmity during my childhood, where my Southern parentage and wandering accent made me a constant target for cries of “English snob” at school.

Scratch the surface of grassroots SNP support and — not always but frequently — you’ll find slow-burning disdain, perhaps all the stronger for often being suppressed in favour of a more polite narrative. It’s usually confined to living rooms and pubs, but gets permissibly unleashed during football tournaments via support for that other national team, Anyone-But-England. And of course, as Sturgeon knows, an equally traditional means of expressing your feelings in this direction is to say how much you hate the Tories.

In the Scottish cultural imagination, the archetype of the sort of English man or woman that is most hated — Southern, posh-accented, privately-educated, and prone to seeing the country primarily in terms of its potential for invitations to hunting lodges — coincides significantly with the sort of Tory MP the membership still seems to prefer. Everybody knows that in saying you hate the latter, there’s at least the suggestion that you hate the former too. For some extreme nationalist groups, such as All Under One Banner and Siol nan Gaidheal, the equivalence is made without embarrassment.

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Once you understand that, unconsciously or otherwise, a contrarian anti-English sentiment implicitly powers many SNP decisions, a lot of other things become clearer too. You better understand how a party attached to sovereignty and self-determination can be so rhetorically keen on EU membership without perceived conflict; or why Scottish Covid policies were reliably more draconian than in England; or how an otherwise astute politician like Sturgeon could become so psychologically wedded to a baffling policy like self-ID. Though of course it isn’t the whole story, part of the answer is Any-Policy-But-England’s, and a passive-aggressive game of always being seen to stay on the right side of nice, with England inevitably cast as the nasty villain to Scotland’s noble but wounded hero.

In the case of self-ID, the knock-on costs are likely to be borne by ordinary Scottish women and girls, among them the further dismantling of single-sex services proudly built up by Scottish women for other women since the Seventies. Such is the naked contempt for women’s interests here, it’s tempting to see the whole project as a fig-leaf for deep-rooted misogyny. But if SNP supporters don’t already care about the present government’s many failures to govern well in practice, it isn’t clear why they would hold them accountable at the ballot box for self-ID either. Sticking it to the English will continue to be the more compelling goal for many voters over other practical considerations. And this highlights another way in which radical transactivism and Scottish nationalism can be a good fit, at least emotionally if not rationally. In practice, both can be a politics of resentment, pretending to be something finer.

It was 2001. The writer and the monarch were standing in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, at an event to celebrate British publishing.

“Yes of course I remember,” the Queen said sharply.

“Well I was the person who brought the news back from Everest, so you got it on time.”

The Queen looked at Morris in silence. Before her stood a properly large lady — a 6ft 4” lady, with wispy white hair harassing a square head. A fascinating, but somewhat odd face. A correct Englishwoman’s voice, but sultry, with a male pitch. A laugh like a cat’s laugh, hissy and languid. And a lady. Were there ladies on Everest, in 1953?

Morris did not explain to the Queen that she had undergone gender reassignment surgery in the decades since the mountain was defeated. “How could I explain to her?” she later said. “Life is too short.”

How to explain Jan Morris? Who was she? What was she? Faced with a life like this, the Queen’s confusion is our own. Morris was a man, and then a woman. He had been a debonair foreign correspondent as the jet age dawned, who transformed into an apparently cheerful old dear wearing pearls in a damp corner of North Wales. He was a superb travel writer who yearned to compose novels, then wrote the Pax Britannica trilogy, the greatest — or at least the most entertaining — narrative history of the late 20th century instead.

She was a trickster who denied the existence of truth, then struggled to have her female identity accepted by her family, her profession, and her society. She wanted to be a raffish romancer, but was “happily married” for 70 years. She hymned British Imperialism, then became a Welsh Nationalist. She was described as an enigma, yet underwent the least enigmatic voluntary medical procedure possible. Her public persona was all bonhomie, but she lived alongside her own gravestone; it haunted the corner of her library for decades. Every time she said she had retired, she resurfaced scant months later with a new book — even after she died in 2020, there she was again, a little while later, with another one. There were 58 of them in the end. More than anything, she was a flirt, a tease. “My life is one long allegory,” Morris claimed. To which the reply, inevitably, is: for what?

Jan Morris was born James Morris in the Somerset seaside town of Clevedon in 1926. His father’s family was Welsh, his mother’s vaguely Norman — division was established as an early theme. The young boy wandered the hills overlooking the coast near his home, already isolated, already convinced “I had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl”, already yearning for the unobtainable. Then the miseries of school (Lancing College), where he was always in trouble, “beaten by prefects more than any other pupil” during the early months of the war. As the conflict wound down, Morris joined the 9th Lancers, serving in Venice, Trieste, and Cairo as an intelligence officer, undertaking what she called “squalid duties of repression and withdrawal”.

In 1953, Morris, at 27 the new foreign editor of The Times, became the official journalist on Edmund Hillary’s expedition to Everest. Breaking the news that Hillary had conquered the mountain made Morris’s career. He was a classic, frenzied overachiever. Celebrated books followed, such as Venice (1960), and the sex-change memoir, Conundrum (1974). These are the room temperature facts, diligently recorded by Paul Clements in his new biography, Jan Morris: Life from both sides. 

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You have to feel sorry for Clements. He was friendly with his subject, which is dangerous for a biographer. Morris destroyed her private papers, and lived, at times, as if existence itself was an inside joke. “Almost nothing in life is what it seems”, she wrote, and we would do well to apply this mantra to Morris’s own life. She claims she knew she was a woman when she was three or four years old — yet she pursued emphatically manly careers in the army and the press. She claimed an ambiguous sexuality — but when she met her wife, Elizabeth, Clements notes that “any questions about gender and sexuality were swept aside”. Five children, one of whom died, followed. The marriage was a perfect patriarchal model: Morris away obsessively working the globe; Elizabeth tending children, garden, accounts and house, alone. “Jan,” said her daughter Suki, “was a very complicated person, not in my view, the simple, lovely being that people see at all”. Nothing was what it seemed. All Clements will say is that she had a “contradictory nature”.

Morris began taking oestrogen pills in 1964, the first stage of an eight-year physical metamorphosis. She had been near-suicidal in the run up to this decision. And at the very moment her identity as a man was crumbling, her country was too. What did James Morris see when he looked around in 1964? He had been born at a time when Britain still decided world questions, and he had always approved of this. Now God was withdrawing His credit from the British. After Everest, Morris was a foreign correspondent for the Guardian. He filed from Cape Town and Bogota, from Cairo and Kabul, from Tel Aviv and Isfahan. He had followed Britain’s armies through the long, bleary rearguard action of imperialism. He had watched that “distasteful ignominy” at Suez. “We were living in a twilight time,” Morris wrote. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging. Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.”

Everywhere was retreat and evacuation. The Promethean spirit — “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life,” the spirit used to whisper — that executed Mughal princes without trial, that snaked railways underneath Rhodesian waterfalls, that doomed prisoners to silent wards on the frigid shores of the Tasman Sea, that Empire-building spirit, was gone. Things would never be the way they were again.

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Bereaved of their worldly footholds — “the grand illusion had collapsed, and England was a European island once more,” he wrote — the British were all alone. Morris’s entire generation was left like Atlas, but relieved of his globe. They would have to find new burdens to carry. It was not enough for him. He wanted more.

So, approaching middle-age, Morris hurled himself into two vast concurrent projects, two escape plans from the wreckage of Britain and his own masculinity. One concerned the past, and the Empire. One concerned the future, and his identity.

Though Clements never makes the connection explicit, it’s clear that James’s decision to become Jan was a peculiarly original response to the end of the British Empire. Read the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968-1978), the first of those projects, written as she transitioned. It is thunderously problematic. Morris described her response to Empire as “sensuous”. She cherished British cruelty in a way no one would dare do today. Empire was was a “flare”, a “blaze”, and an “ambition for its own sake”. As the 19th century turned, the British “yearned to break out of their sad and prosaic realities, and live more brilliant lives in Xanadu”. Other lands, from Ireland to India, were collateral, and Morris could live with that.

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Gender shadows these books. Clearly, it made Morris’s hairs stand on end to think about the sheer effrontery of men like Robert Clive, or Admiral “Jackie” Fisher or Winston Churchill. She remembered the gentlemen of the East India Company as “showy, amoral… Plundering, fighting and trading in a spirit of uncensorious give and take”. She loved the men of peak Empire even more. They had everything the men in her generation lacked: constancy, surety, a granite bedrock of Christian faith. Here she is on John Nicholson, an Anglo-Irish Army officer who flew through British India like a tempest. He was “a fable in his own lifetime… He was a fighter… He was a big man… He looked utterly sure.”

By the third volume of the trilogy, Farewell The Trumpets (1978), composed after Morris had her gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca, it was not merely the British Empire that was coming apart. It was British masculinity itself. Suez was the empire’s tomb, and a finale for the British male. Looking back at the troops sent to occupy Port Said in 1955, she saw them as “self-conscious”, their half-hearted war-making “somehow fraudulent”, suffused with a “sham virility”. Around them the Egyptian city stood “shattered and appalled… a bitter memorial to the last display of imperial machismo.” All the certainty had vanished. The sad-sack farrago at Suez raised more than geopolitical questions for Morris. If, after centuries of vigorous domination, British masculinity was impotent and no longer plausible, then why be a British man at all?

Well, how about a woman? This was the second project. In Conundrum, Morris elaborated on her notion of womanhood. It was not designed to please feminists. It was designed to be the opposite of the Victorian imperialists Morris so admired. “My own notion of the female principle was one of gentleness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading.” In post-Imperial Britain, if Morris could not be a wolf, she would be a lamb. She would escape into her own romantic idea of femininity. To be a woman rather than a man, she argued, was simply a matter of “good taste”.

Published in 1974, Conundrum became, in Clements’ imaginative phrase, a “media circus”. Morris, the handsome writer, was the highest-profile person to change gender in British history. Her persona was savaged in print and on television. “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman,” wrote Rebecca West, “and curiously enough, the idea of a woman not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be.” Germaine Greer accused a “self-indulgent” Morris of lacking frankness about what her “new body looks like and how it works”. Nora Ephron laughed at her: Morris was “perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is… A girl”. A particularly brutal drubbing in the Times Literary Supplement left Morris writing to the editor. “Your cruel review of Conundrum has reduced me to tears.”

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By Jo Brown

Every line of today’s battles over gender identity was scripted in the furore around Conundrum and Morris in the early Seventies. She appeared on a BBC talkshow and faced a 45-minute barrage of questions from an MP, a psychiatrist and a feminist. Morris was told that her book was “proselytising and immoral”. Her notion of womanhood was “ridiculous” and “limited”. Morris responded that it was “arrogant” to assume anyone could know what anyone else might feel like. The transexual experience was an “inner-music” and a quest towards a new reality. Gender, Morris told millions of TV viewers, “is the way people feel and the way they want other people to think about them — it is the spirit, the soul, and the innermost essence of what people feel they are.” Morris was saying that trans women are women. She may have been the first to do so in Britain. “I’m afraid you must take it or leave it”, she told the bewildered panel.

Overnight, Morris’s life was truly allegorical. Her life was a bridge between two worlds. The first was the old reality, where identity was confirmed in collective endeavours like the British Empire, inherited beliefs like Christianity and powerful institutions like the Armed Forces or Fleet Street. When she became a woman, Morris was clearing a path towards the second world we live in now. Identity is confirmed by the individual, through a series of deliberate choices rather than an inherited set of traditions, and based entirely on feelings. All she wanted, “was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love”.

Morris suspected that she was a prophet. “Is mine only a transient phenomenon” she wondered, “between the dogmatism of the last century, when men were men and women were ladies, and the eclecticism of the next, when citizens will be free to live in the gender roles they prefer?” Asked about the pushback against the trans movement in 2017, an increasingly ancient Morris said our “moment is messy, but I think more and more people will move to my condition”. She believed it was possible that “everyone has the potential to have both genders in them”.

Jan Morris was an early adopter of an ideology that has swept across the Western world in the past 30 years. Conundrum has never been out of print. Morris’s belief — born from the collapse of empire, engineered to replace her imperial faith — that gender is ineffable and innate, are becoming commonplace in institutional settings. When Morris died, one of the leading tributes came from the chief executive of the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service.

Is this simply fashion? Is this ideology “cronyistic” as Helen Joyce, and other gender-critical writers have suggested? Some feminists argue that gender-identity ideology will be abandoned “when it is no longer in the ascendent”, the politicians and tech billionaires will junk the pronouns in their emails, biology will reassert itself, and women will no longer have penises.

Morris prefigured our present, but perhaps she represented the future too. Our great-grandparents believed that masturbation caused insanity. Our great-grandchildren may come to view the idea that only natal women can bear children with a mixture of condescension, alarm, and laughter. A quaint and horrible belief, like phrenology.

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“The sexual attitudes of any given society”, Gore Vidal said, “are the result of political decisions.” He was right. Biological facts exist only up to a point. Power is more important. If power decides that fantasy and feeling take precedence over evolution and biology, then fantasy and feeling become fact. The distinction between the sexes can be socially engineered. The technology to make it so exists.

Whether such a shift will make people happier — which is surely the point of it — is difficult to answer. In her life as a woman, we can detect something quietly unwell about Morris. Nothing was as it seemed. She told interviewers how much she loved floral dresses and embraced a rather desperate frivolity. The hard-edges of James Morris were publicly sanded away. She would no longer take things that seriously — “far better in my opinion to regard the great world as a kind of show, a tragicomedy put on for my fascination”. Such an attitude of high unseriousness can only come from believing that there are no great causes left, that nothing really matters, so you may as well laugh. She  praised callowness. “Give me fizz, give me irresponsibility, and if I ever feel maturity creeping in, crack a bottle, put out more flags, and ring bells!”

It was a masquerade. “Many wondered,” writes Clements, “if there was an underlying melancholy behind this facade”. Seen as a whole, Morris’s entire life appears as a trick question, like the one she asked the Queen that day in Buckingham Palace. Could Britain get over the loss of Empire? And could a man be a woman? Morris was not the first, nor will she be the last, to discover that there are no simple answers to either question.

As a result of being repeatedly sexually assaulted in her teens, Watson began to feel hatred towards her female body. She was spending a lot of time on the internet, and began following a number of young trans men who were speaking positively, “if not euphorically”, about their transition. “I feel like I was groomed online,” says Watson. “According to Tumblr and YouTube, becoming a trans man would be the answer to all my problems.”

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Watson’s testimony echoes the experiences of many. The controversy surrounding the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, which is to be closed following a review by Dr Hilary Cass OBE, has led to a number of young women speaking out about their deep regret at medical transition.

Watson self-referred to the Sandyford in 2014, having spent time in a psychiatric unit following a severe mental breakdown. “I burned my house down while trying to kill myself,” she says, “and made out to the doctor it was because I was really a trans man and needed to transition. That was bullshit.” Watson was suffering from depression, dependent on alcohol, and struggling to accept that she was a lesbian.

Almost a year later, she was finally given an appointment at the Sandyford. “I walked up to reception and said my name is Sean Watson and I’m here to see a gender therapist.” She explains how the clinician put her at ease, immediately confirming her trans status and using “he/him” pronouns for her, all of which put Watson “on a high” of validation. “I thought: ‘These are professionals, if I wasn’t trans they would tell me, so the fact that they are affirming me means that I am trans.’”

“They must have looked at my GP records which showed a very long history of mental illness and trauma,” says Watson. “They didn’t once say to me, ‘We can see that there’s been some sexual abuse in your past, I wonder if that might have impacted on how uncomfortable you feel being a woman’.”

Understandably angry about everything she was put through, Watson now asks: “Why didn’t they ask why I wanted to live as a man, and talk these things through with me before starting me on a path of irreversible treatment?”

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After that first appointment, the Sandyford gave Watson a pamphlet that listed the side effects of testosterone, and asked her what changes to her body she was hoping for. “I said a deeper voice, a beard, fat redistribution and muscle mass. They were like, ‘Oh, OK, you know you might lose your head hair, get acne, and gain a lot of weight as well? How would you feel about those changes?’ I said I didn’t care. So basically, they were warning me I might be a bald, fat, spotty man.”

When patients attend a gender identity clinic, they are not supposed to transition until they have enough “lived experience” as the opposite sex. So, when the Sandyford asked how long Watson had been living as a man, she said, “two years”. That was all the evidence they needed. Within five months of her first appointment, Watson was given her first dose of testosterone. “The nurse told me to inject it every three weeks and said that I had to increase the dose steadily. I was given full vials and warned not to inject the lot. But of course I did.”

Watson soon experienced chronic abdominal and pelvic pain; clitoral irritation and discomfort due to enlargement; vaginal dryness and discomfort; and bladder problems such as a very regular urge to urinate, difficulty holding in urine, and wetting the bed. There was also the possibility that, although she still had female genitalia and reproductive organs, she was now infertile due to the testosterone.

After two years on testosterone, the Sandyford prescribed a double mastectomy, which was carried out in 2017. “The clinician told me the waiting list had increased from one year to two, because there was a huge increase in demand, as more young women were identifying as transgender,” says Watson.

“The nurse said ‘We need to make sure your breasts are healthy enough to remove’, before examining me, which sounded surreal,” Watson tells me, stunned that only healthy tissue could be surgically removed. “She then warned me that there was a possibility I would lose complete sensation in my chest and that my nipples may die and fall off.”

After the surgery, once the pain eventually subsided, Watson found that her chest area was completely numb. “I expected to feel elated, but it was the strangest feeling, having no breasts, and I began to wonder what on earth I had done.” Feeling has never returned to this part of her body. “Following the medical transition, I have been left with an overwhelming sense of loss, and intense despair over the irreversible changes I underwent as a vulnerable young woman.”

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On returning to the hospital to have her stitches removed, Watson was asked if she would give permission for a photograph of her chest to be in a catalogue, to show subsequent patients the various stages of healing. “I was like, ‘I don’t care. I got my surgery’. And I often wonder, now that I bitterly regret the whole thing: is my surgery, is my photo in that book being used to show other young women going under the knife right now? And the thought fucking sickens me.”

Having decided not to attend the Sandyford for regular blood tests — a requirement for those injecting testosterone — because she no longer trusted them, Watson stopped all contact with the clinic. They never followed up to see how she was. The only medical support she had was from her sympathetic GP, who admitted that gender identity was outside his field of knowledge but tried to support her as best he could. After confiding in him that she had stopped taking testosterone and now deeply regretted transitioning, Watson finally heard from Sandyford again. But by this time, two years had passed since her surgery.

“I got a letter from them saying ‘We’re more than happy to speak to you. If you ever do want to come in, call us and make an appointment’. But that was the last place I wanted to be,” she tells me. “I needed therapy but ended up being referred to one who had clearly swallowed the whole trans ideology and when I said I regretted my transition, said ‘perhaps you are non-binary’!”

In despair, Watson bluntly explained to the counsellor: “I can’t be a man. You can’t change sex. Pumping me full of cross-sex hormones and cutting off body parts is not going to make me a man.” Astonishingly, the counsellor then turned to a trainee who had been sitting in on the session and said: “Although Ms Watson thinks you can’t change sex, that’s her view, not mine.”

Feeling suicidal yet again, Watson decided that she could not bear to carry on living in limbo, or to put her family and loved ones through any more pain and worry. She began to research “transgender regret” and “detransition” online and found “a surprisingly large number of them. And then they told me their stories. I basically went from being horrifically depressed and suicidal to so fucking angry.”

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I contacted Sandyford for comment and received the following response: “Patients attending Sandyford’s Gender Identity Service undergo a full assessment by a multi-disciplinary team of psychiatrists, sexual health doctors, psychology and occupational therapists. The evaluation takes multiple engagements over an extended period of time to ensure patients fully understand the process, are aware of all implications and are enabled to make fully informed choices.” But, as Watson explains, she only ever saw one clinician, at most half a dozen times.

Watson is calling for the Sandyford Gender Identity Service to be shut down. “I never thought I was a man, I just didn’t want to be a woman. They should never have affirmed me. It was their job to scrutinise the problems I was having that led me to that place.”

These days, Watson refers to herself as bisexual and is in a happy relationship with a man, which was something she would not have considered pre-transition. “Until I was 27, I had never been attracted to men, but my sexuality changed with testosterone. This has also happened to loads of other women I have spoken to.”

Having spent four-and-a-half years on testosterone, she still has facial stubble and a deep voice. As part of her healing process, Watson is paying for laser treatment for her beard, as well as counselling. “For the therapy, I cannot believe the difference. To sit and speak to a clinically-neutral professional who seems genuinely interested in listening to me and offering solutions that will actually help me felt so cathartic.”

Watson says she’s not the only one who is glad she is back to being herself: “Sean was an arsehole. Very argumentative, rude, constantly trying to appear like a tough guy. My sister hated him. She said I seemed really angry and bitter when I was Sean.”

Meanwhile, the recommendation of Dr Hilary Cass’s report on the Tavistock gender clinic — that it be shut down and replaced with a more “holistic approach” — gave Watson hope. Finally, she is optimistic that the transing of swathes of gender non-conforming and traumatised females will be recognised for what it is: the biggest medical scandal since Thalidomide.

The Walt Disney Company, founded in 1923 by Walt and brother Roy, was a formidable cultural force throughout its 50-year existence prior to the resort’s inception, but ownership of thousands of acres of Florida land and the unchecked power to shape it granted the corporation unprecedented control and room for continual expansion. The cultural force transformed into an American juggernaut.

To understand the scale and reach of Disney’s power in Florida, one only need look at the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the governing jurisdiction for the land on which Disney World is located. The district, created in 1967 by a special act of the Florida legislature, gave Disney World the power to operate like a county government. There, Disney World functions as its own mini-country in the state of Florida. Disney World has the authority to claim eminent domain and even build a nuclear power plant (pending federal approval); it also operates its own public utilities and has its own fire department.

The state of Florida handed Disney World a once-in-a-generation deal, but it also took much from the accord. In the pre-Disney days, there was no reason to stop in Central Florida, unless one wanted to do battle with a gator. The arrival of Disney World planted the seed for the Florida we know today, one that continually blossoms with the resort’s ever-expanding reach. It’s not an overstatement to say that Disney World opened up Florida to the rest of the country — and the world, for that matter — and that this symbiotic relationship seemed unbreakable.

For so long, you went to Florida to go to Disney, which is to say that Disney was Florida. To think that Disney World would one day become a culture war battleground and the decades-long arrangement destroyed was unthinkable, but the mouse would eventually meet its match in a fellow Central Floridian — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

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In early June, through no fault of my own, I went to Disney World. My girlfriend’s family was making the annual trek to the mouse’s kingdom, so, like a good boyfriend, I donned the Mickey Mouse ears — for the amusement of the young children in our party, I told myself — and stepped into Magic Kingdom on a sweltering Florida morning. As a native Floridian, I’d grown up going to Disney. I understood why children loved Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Goofy and all the others, but I was confounded by the adults — some of them even seemed well-adjusted — who were obsessed with all things Disney.

These obsessives, pejoratively knowns as “Disney adults,” bankroll the entire operation. They construct their identities around their love of the mouse. How an adult can identify with a mouse or a dog or even a fairy is beyond me, but pathological fandom, especially when rooted in childhood nostalgia, will make even the most sensible person act irrationally.

Entering Magic Kingdom, Disney’s World’s flagship theme park, one immediately sees Cinderella’s castle in the distance. To a child, the castle is Cinderella’s actual home, but for the Disney adult it symbolises that they’ve finally arrived at their spiritual home. To a 30-something man like me, who is neither a Disney lover nor hater, the castle is a testament to the insane visionary genius of Walt Disney.

This one-time illustrator cooked up the idea to prop up a princess castle in Central Florida, and here we all are making a beeline for it. What’s even more impressive is that the castle really is beautiful, not kitsch. Looking at it for the first time in years, I thought of my parents and my sister — a Disney adult herself who identifies with Minnie Mouse — and of all the days we spent at the park. 

Even though I knew I was being worked over by Walt’s nostalgia machine, I felt happy and wistful. Walt Disney figured out that everyone wants to return to a state of childhood innocence, and if he could tie the desire for that innocence to his brand — and even intertwine the two — he’d have an empire on his hands. For millions of people, returning to their childhoods means returning to Florida.

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Dreams and nostalgia are tainted by overt politicisation, which is why Disney has always been crafty with their political postures and sloganeering. As I walked through the Magic Kingdom, aware that I was there during Pride Month and that the Walt Disney Company employs large numbers of LGBTQ people, I saw rainbow-coloured mouse ears and rainbow-coloured ice cream bars, but not much else. The stores selling Disney merchandise had a single Pride display with the rainbow ears and other pride-related items, but it didn’t draw attention to itself. This is how Disney likes to operate; the company has “pride” but not in an over-the-top way that alienates more conservative Disney adults. Disney mostly succeeded at keeping its Americana-styled aesthetics intact as its staff has grown increasingly progressive throughout the years.

Yet this delicate balancing act recently ended, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill — better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Keeping as apolitical as possible, the Disney Company did not make an initial statement denouncing the bill, to the surprise of its progressive employees. They threatened a walkout, so Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s hand was forced; he attacked the bill, but employees, angered that the denunciation wasn’t forceful enough, walked out anyway.

DeSantis did not appreciate Disney’s condemnation and called out the company for its ties to communist China. A back and forth ensued, DeSantis setting his sights on bringing Disney down a peg. The Walt Disney Company was officially part of the culture war, and it was up against a confident and game Ron DeSantis.

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The governor, unknown before the pandemic, was thrown into the national spotlight when the mainstream media positioned him as the antithesis of the pro-lockdown New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. When DeSantis refused to lock down Florida during its summer 2020 Covid surge, the media labeled him genocidal, and he was lambasted by critics as “DeathSantis”, but he didn’t change course.

In the end, as blue states clung to overextended lockdowns, DeSantis was vindicated; Florida’s death rate from Covid is comparable to California’s. DeSantis leaned hard into his newfound position as Republican saviour and has proceeded to shape Florida in his image ever since. With the influx of blue state refugees into the state and DeSantis’ sudden ascendance, Florida has entered a renaissance period. DeSantis has taken to calling the state “the free state of Florida”. It was only a matter of time before the state’s newest juggernaut came up against its original powerhouse.

DeSantis’ tussle with Disney World was a genuinely shocking moment. For one thing, it proved that the governor was not a PR-construct doing an impression of Donald Trump. In April of 2022, DeSantis made his move and signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District; it goes into effect June 2023. Disney thought itself untouchable — and it had been for decades — but DeSantis slapped the mouse on the head. The message was clear: this is my state now.

This is the new Florida. The mouse is on the defensive, and the situation has only been made worse by the release of videos showing Disney employees discussing the incorporation of trans-inclusive characters and the like into new programming. Disney can no longer defend its apolitical position.

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In 1965, Walt Disney called his plan to construct Disney World “The Florida Project”. Disney’s plan to transform the centre of the state, as well as its national brand, into an appendage of the mouse, was a resounding success. Walt Disney World is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but the company never expected that this would coincide with the possible end of “The Florida Project”. 

Today, Governor Ron DeSantis and his project of rebranding Florida is now the state’s most formidable force. In a recent interview with Dave Rubin, DeSantis couldn’t have made it any clearer where he stands on the mouse: “I did not take an oath to subcontract my leadership to some corporation in Burbank, California.” Disney World, DeSantis is claiming, was always a California outsider, a usurper. The mouse’s occupation is finally over.

Disney World will certainly maintain its status as a cultural force after the Reedy Creek Improvement District is dissolved, but DeSantis’s assault has wounded a previously invincible titan. To some who’d considered themselves Disney adults, the mouse is now a rodent. Progressives, on the other hand, many of whom have made fun of Disney adults throughout the years for being dorks, have now taken up the Disney cause. They’re donning rainbow-coloured mouse ears — and heading to what is now the most politicised place on earth.

Kate, the pupil in question (whose name we have changed), contacted me on social media. She had seen my condemnation of Jones’s attempts to, in my view, discredit the story and wanted to tell it in her own words. In any case Jones was wrong: her school couldn’t be named for legal reasons — and the children couldn’t be identified. So we meet in central London. She seems wise beyond her 19 years and remarkably articulate: she gives the impression she reads Dostoevsky and Socrates for fun.

“Announcing it via Twitter — that was vindictive,” she says of Jones. “Finding the school — think how much harm he could do to its reputation. If it was ruined, how could it do better in future? He seemed convinced it was just a case of high school bullying that was contrived by a bigot to victimise herself.”

She goes on to tell me what happened, pausing often to compose herself. A politician who sits in the House of Lords visited the school to give a talk on their campaigning for LGBT rights. It was compulsory for the Sixth Form to attend. This peer was dogmatic from the very beginning, claiming that trans people are denied human rights and suggested that the House of Lords is shot through with bigotry. Kate was “disconcerted” by the speaker’s “righteous denunciation of her peers as irredeemably transphobic”. So, after careful consideration, she decided to ask a question relating to how the definition of “woman” differs between critical theory and biological reality.

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When Kate asked about how to achieve productive consensus when there are such opposing views, the peer accused her of reducing the issue to semantics. “I said, ‘I respectfully disagree’, and thought that was the best place to leave it.” At this point, though Kate didn’t realise it at the time, one of her fellow pupils ran out the room crying.

Afterwards, Kate heard several students talking about “transphobia”, and saying that Kate had caused them real harm. Later, the allegations grew: some claimed Kate had caused trans students to consider suicide. When she went to collect her bag from the locker room, she encountered the head girl, who treated her coldly. Then, a number of students circled her and started calling her names: Nazi, bigot, fascist, transphobe, homophobe, racist, cunt.

“I felt their spit on my face,” she says. Shaking, she broke out of the circle and ran, only to fall to the floor. One student, in distress, ran after Kate to ask if she was OK. And later, the Head of Sixth Form asked the students who had berated Kate: “How could you do this?”

But Kate’s ordeal was far from over. Arriving at school the following morning, she found her desk covered in printouts of trans flags, each emblazoned with the text: “Trans right are human rights”. The day after, the other sixth-formers staged a spontaneous “Trans Day of Visibility”, some students coming to school dressed in pink, white and blue, the colours of the trans flag. No one had told Kate about it.

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An investigation was opened into the alleged bullying of Kate, and the Deputy Head interviewed several of the students, including Kate. Then, a few days later, Kate came into school only to overhear her favourite teacher apologising to her fellow sixth-formers for focusing on Kate and allowing others to be distressed by her “terrible, hateful behaviour”.

Later, a second investigation was launched, “to justify the reaction of the girls”, says Kate — one that focused on her allegedly “‘provocative’ history, going back five years”.

Feeling distressed after what she felt was public condemnation, Kate self-harmed on school premises. She was then asked to stay home for several weeks, “because I was seen as a danger to myself and to other students”.

Eventually, Kate returned to school. She was keen to get on with her studies; she’d previously had to retake her GCSE year because she’d been hospitalised with anorexia. However, she was made to sit in the library, separate from other students, “just surrounded by books and my own thoughts”. The isolation had a terrible impact on her mental health. “I started to see food as completely unappetising again.” But when she asked to go back into school properly, she was told that she had “distressed” the students for too many years, when all they had done was look out for her.

Then she decided she’d had enough. She cleared her locker, walked out of the school, and never went back. Kate is continuing her studies online and is on course to begin university by the time she’s 21. “I will feel as if I’m a mature student,” she laughs.

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It’s clear that some of Kate’s views on trans issues have developed as a result of her personal experience of anorexia. “I couldn’t help but hear the anorexic mentality reverberate in conversations of gender dysphoria,” she says. “Both aspire to reach an idealised, elusive form of the self. Both are driven by a desire to control one’s reality.”

She had experienced some “very traumatic health incidents” as a teenager; after spending a year in hospital, aged 13, being treated for her eating disorder with other girls from very different backgrounds, Kate re-entered the world “fundamentally changed”. Her school had also changed. It had become involved with Stonewall and there were several girls identifying as non-binary or trans. But the school had always been more liberal than establishment, and Kate was fond of many of her teachers. It was these positive experiences that made her feel she could question, out loud, whether she was a “bad person” for doubting trans ideology.

“Why would they turn on me so viciously?” Kate wondered.

“I’m not denying the validity of medical transition as a means to stifle anguish,” she adds. But there is a difference, says Kate, between transitioning to control one’s perception of oneself, which relies on external social validation, and doing so to alleviate profound psychological distress. “In accepting the constraints of biological reality you’re assuming both a burden and responsibility. I empathise with that. It must be unfathomably difficult.” During the height of her anorexia, she felt that “I would kill myself if I gained weight”.

Kate told me didn’t know what she wants to do with her life, but that she “can’t wait” to get to university. She is nervous, though, about entering another place of education in today’s climate. She fears that, these days, “there is no forgiveness for those branded with the damning suffix of ‘–phobic’”.

Back in 2018, when the obvious fallacies of gender ideology made me feel merely puzzled as opposed to completely enraged, a friend of mine went to the Commonwealth Games. He’s a sportswriter, and a few years younger than me and so – adhering to the generational divide on this issue – he disagreed with me about gender. He thought I was too rigid in my belief that changing gender is not the same as changing sex, which I maintain is impossible. He also thought my fears that males would disproportionately benefit and potentially exploit from the blurring between gender and sex were overblown. Stop being so binary, daddio, we’re all fluid now!

It so happened that it was at this Commonwealth Games that a trans athlete was allowed to compete for the first time: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard. Hubbard was widely expected to win gold, despite being 40-years old and therefore about twice as old as her competitors. My friend watched Hubbard’s event and he texted me afterwards. Hubbard hadn’t won, he wrote, because she injured her elbow. There was a pause while he wrote the next text. Then it came through: “But OK. I understand what you have been saying.”

So I always knew it would start with sport. The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.

While Hubbard was middle aged and in far from peak condition, Thomas is, visibly, a very different story, and her teammates and the parents of other swimmers have been extremely vocal in their protests. Encouraged, no doubt, by the openness of the arguments about Thomas, protests kicked off again when it was announced that 21-year-old Emily Bridges — who, until last month, was racing as a man — would compete in the women’s British National Omnium Championship. Bridges was ruled out at the last minute when someone realised she was, rather awkwardly, still registered as a male cyclist. But a change of tone was palpable in British Cycling’s announcement afterwards that “fairness is essential”, and Sara Symington, the head of Britain’s Olympic cycling programme, said the UCI needed to change its policy of allowing transgender riders to compete against women.

Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case. Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”

“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?

Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists – and, most of all, Stonewall – pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition and any open acknowledgement of female biology.

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This third issue caused the Labour Party to have one of its regular internal breakdowns, as its politicians – and leader – became unable to answer the question, what is a woman? And not only could they not answer the question, they couldn’t think of a way to not answer the question, hemming and hawing about it being a “gotcha” question. Yes, it is, interviewers replied, and what we’re trying to get is an answer that a three-year old could provide. Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.

The Tories have certainly not been spared from all this. On 30 March, at 2:48am, the Tory MP Jamie Wallis posted on Twitter to say that he’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and would like to be trans. Suddenly, his long history of dodginess – from running companies that attracted more than 800 complaints, to being affiliated with a sugar daddy website, to fleeing the site of a car crash – was instantly forgotten and his honesty and courage were trumpeted to parliament’s rafters by, among others, the Prime Minister. It was strikingly reminiscent of that time, in 2015, when Glamour magazine named Caitlyn Jenner Woman of the Year, two months after she was involved in a car accident in which a woman, Kim Howe, died. The district attorney ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Jenner, but Glamour decided they had all the evidence they needed to cite her as the year’s best woman. At least Caitlyn bothered to make an effort: in the sobering light of day, Wallis tweeted, “I remain the same person I was yesterday, and so will continue to use he/him/his pronouns.” So no change at all, then, other than the identity of being trans. Or wanting to be, anyway.

For several years now, Stonewall has been campaigning hard for self-ID, which is when a person can be whatever gender they say they are without any physical intervention, to be recognised in law. Wallis can now self-identify as a woman and he is a handy illustration of what happens when theory collides with reality. Nothing else about Wallis has changed, not even his all-important pronouns. But according to Stonewall’s argument, he’s a woman. As much as gender ideologues try to paint gender critical feminists as “radical”, they are the radical ones, insisting that everything we know about biology and society is wrong, and that people can see one thing with their eyes, but must say something else with their mouths. How far was the Conservative Party going to allow themselves to go with this new radical position?

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Is Jamie Wallis exploiting his trauma?

By Mary Harrington

Last week, the Tories executed a double U-turn, the result of which was to press ahead with banning conversion practices in regards to sexual orientation – in other words, outlawing “pray away the gay” practitioners – but not in regards to gender. Iain Anderson, the Government’s LGBT business champion resigned, saying that the Tories were putting “dividing lines between LGB and Trans people”. Stonewall pulled out of the forthcoming Safe To Be Me event, the UK’s first LGBT+ conference, followed by a consortium of LGBT+ voluntary and charity organisations — including “Body Positive Cheshire and North Wales” and “Claire’s Transgender Talks”.

Ultimately, Safe To Be Me was cancelled, but this has certainly not stopped the angry discourse. The author Philip Pullman tweeted, “To ban conversion therapy, so-called, is good. To make a deliberate exception for trans people is pure, cold-eyed evil. No justification, no reason, no excuse: just to appease the transphobes. Evil.”

Language matters. Trans activists know this better than most, which is why they’re so insistent about pronouns and trans inclusive terms such as “pregnant people” and “uterus haver”. Conversion therapy is a terrifying term. Exploratory therapy, or talking therapy, is much less so, and that is actually what was at issue here.

Contrary to what Stonewall, Pullman and the rest of them think, there were many reasons for the Government’s decision, and they are laid out in the Cass review, which was published last month. This echoes concerns already expressed in the courts, and by several NHS whistleblowers. Namely, that gender dysphoria is not the same as sexuality (as Stonewall — of all organisations — surely knows), and there may be many reasons for a child feeling confused about their gender. At the moment, two-thirds of gender dysphoric young people are girls, many display signs of autistic spectrum disorder, some have eating disorders, some may be gay. Stonewall and other organisations insist that the way to treat these children is through “affirmative therapy”, which tells them they are correct to feel uncomfortable in their bodies and should change gender.

But as the Cass review stresses, so much is still unknown about gender dysphoric young people: there may be many reasons for their distress, ranging from sexual abuse to internalised homophobia. These young people need to explore their feelings with a professional, not be rushed into medical treatments that can have deeply damaging long-term effects. That is not an endorsement of conversion therapy, but of good therapeutic practice. After all, in what other scenario are distressed young people encouraged to diagnose and treat themselves?

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Then, yesterday, the Prime Minister felt sufficiently emboldened to say what the Labour leader still cannot, and what so many women — from Kathleen Stock to Maya Forstater — had been sacked for expressing in the past: gender ideology, in its extreme form, doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t work.  “I don’t think it’s reasonable for kids to be deemed so-called Gillick-competent to take decisions about their gender or irreversible treatments that they may have,” he said. He added that “biological males” and should not be competing in women’s sports, and that private spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms should be single sex, thereby echoing the EHRC, which this week said that transgender people can be excluded from single-sex services for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma and to ensure health and safety.

In other words, the feelings of trans people do not, in all instances, trump the needs of women — which is what the gender ideologues have been arguing for all along. Johnson added that he is “immensely sympathetic to people who want to change gender… But these are complex issues and I don’t think they can be solved with one swift easy piece of legislation. It takes a lot of thought to get this right.”

The gender activists loudly cried that this was a re-run of Section 28. But if you heard bigotry in the PM’s words, you weren’t really listening: Johnson sounded moderate and realistic. Meanwhile Labour continues to flail in the background over whether or not men can get pregnant. The Left have handed the Right this victory on a gold platter.

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Joe Biden's gender agenda

By Park MacDougald

This was the week when the wheels started to come off the ideological bandwagon, when Stonewall’s grip on British politicians began to loosen. Quite how it all started in the first place is a story for another day, although that story could well start in 2016 when Ruth Hunt — then the CEO of Stonewall, now in the House of Lords — admitted in a speech that Stonewall was having difficulty raising donations after gay marriage was legalised, as donors thought gay people were “all right now”. “And what we’ve had to say to them is, well, you still wouldn’t feel safe enough if you were on the night bus, but well done for being rich enough to get an Addison Lee,” she said. She then reeled off further examples of people who might need Stonewall’s help, and concluded with “You still wouldn’t be safe enough if you were transitioning in your gender.” Did Hunt hype up the gender campaign and sell out women – which, of course, includes lesbians and bisexual women – just to ensure Stonewall’s revenue flow? Like I said, a story for another day.

In the end, it wasn’t one person who pointed out that gender extremism wears no clothes. There were so many: therapists, academics, parents, authors, athletes, politicians, barristers, journalists, scientists, feminists, gay activists, all shouting over the years that this ideology would hurt women, children, gay people and trans people. And this was the week the spell began to break.

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It actually isn’t, but let’s leave that fact aside for the moment. Is this man stupid? A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have said so. A couple of years ago, I voted for him in the Labour leadership contest, not because I thought he would be brilliant, but because I imagined he would at least be adequate. My expectations weren’t high, but they’ve still been disappointed. Last week he showed himself to be either stupid, or so committed to an extreme ideology that he has lost sight of its disastrous impact on women.

What did his hosts make of it, I wonder? Earlier in the day, Starmer had a meeting with the Estonian defence minister in Tallinn, around 230 miles from St Petersburg, the hometown of Vladimir Putin. I’m just guessing here, but I suspect Estonia’s top brass have more pressing worries on their minds than the hurdles faced by trans-identified males in North London who want a gender recognition certificate. How they must have applauded when Sir Keir’s trip created headlines about wanting greater “respect and dignity” for transgender people. And in the week of International Women’s Day, too. All this reveals quite starkly where the Labour leader’s priorities lie.

What is really terrible about Starmer’s “intervention” is that it feels deliberate. Two members of his shadow Cabinet had stumbled over the “what is a woman?” question earlier in the week, so it was entirely predictable that journalists would confront him with it. He could have said that it wasn’t the time or the place to talk about domestic politics. He could have responded “adult human female” and left it there. But he didn’t. He had his answer ready — and it could not have been more confrontational.

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There can be little doubt that this is Starmer throwing down the gauntlet. In the past he has appeared shifty and uncomfortable when asked questions about biology, spouting nonsense about women’s bodies while looking like someone taking part in a hostage video. No, he told Andrew Marr, it isn’t right to say only women have a cervix. (I once had to have treatment for a pre-cancer of the cervix. I can assure you, and the leader of the Labour party, that all the patients at the clinic were women.)

But last week, Labour couldn’t hide any longer. On Tuesday, the shadow women and equalities minister, Anneliese Dodds, tied herself in knots on Woman’s Hour when asked to give Labour’s definition of a woman. She began by suggesting “there are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is”, as though she was a hapless barrister, trying to pacify a prickly judge. Then she said it “depend[s] what the context is”, without explaining the context in which a woman might not be a woman.

Next she tried a blatant appeal to emotion: “You know, there are people who have decided they have to make that transition. You know, I’ve spoken with many of them. It’s been a very difficult process for many of those people. And you know, understandably because they live as a woman, you know, they want to be defined as a woman.” Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same as someone born a woman, does it?

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The next day, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, dodged the question by declaring she wasn’t going to go down that rabbit hole, prompting mocking cries of “what is a rabbit?” (Does that depend on context, too?)

Then it was the turn of Harriet Harman, veteran Labour MP and former acting leader of the party, who faced the question in a wide-ranging interview with Sky’s Sophy Ridge. My spirits rose when I saw the headline: “Labour has a woman problem”. But it turned out Harman was talking about the fact that the party has never had a woman leader.

Later in the interview, using the awkward language Labour MPs habitually adopt when talking about this issue, she came out with this belter: “So far as I’m concerned, women are women who are born women, but women are also women who are trans women.” By Harman’s logic, the party’s first woman leader could be a man.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

To be cruelly frank, women are being gaslighted. Labour’s leaders say they believe in single-sex spaces, but what does that mean when they also insist that trans women are no different from natal women? Starmer’s own position is a statement of the law as he would like it to be, rather than as it actually is, as the barrister Naomi Cunningham pointed out at the weekend. Cunningham’s area of expertise is the interaction between the 2004 Gender Recognition Act and the 2010 Equality Act, both of which were cited by Starmer during his interview in Estonia. Asked whether the law says that trans women are women, her admirably concise answer was: “No.”

It is true that the GRA can change some people’s legal sex, but it obviously doesn’t change biological sex; it can say they should be treated as women for most legal purposes, but allows that a trans woman can be refused access to a female-only space if there’s a good reason.

This goes to the heart of the mess Labour has got itself into. Starmer and his colleagues have confused a polite fiction — “trans women are women” — with reality. A piece of legislation that was passed almost two decades ago to make the lives of transgender people easier is now being used in a way that was never intended, making safeguarding of vulnerable women and girls difficult if not impossible.

You might think someone who used to be Director of Public Prosecutions would know that. You might think Starmer has first-hand experience of how predatory men operate, and be aware that they pretend to be all sorts of things — from harmless taxi drivers to trans women, on some well-documented occasions — to get access to potential victims. His staggeringly ill-judged interview in Estonia suggests otherwise. Back in the UK, women feel utterly betrayed — and many of us are wondering if we will ever be able to vote Labour again.

Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender critical” view that human beings cannot change sex, and that sex matters. Some cases, like mine, have become publicly known, but they are the tip of the iceberg. Many of the people who have endured complaints, and been subject to internal disciplinary processes, go unnoticed. As do those so afraid of losing their jobs that they remain anonymous when expressing their views online.

Despite this, the debate has gone mainstream in the last three years. Today, the gender debate can be heard in parliament, academia and the media, as well as on social media and in discussions between friends. There have been best-selling books on the subject and all manner of public figures — from Trevor Phillips and Tony Blair to Martina Navratilova and Tanni Grey-Thompson — have spoken up on the issue.

More people are speaking up about the need for clarity about sex, for safeguarding and women’s rights. They work in education, healthcare, in parliament and the media. Most of all, there are parents speaking up to their children’s schools.

I first started tweeting about the issue in 2018, back when the UK government was consulting on whether to reform the Gender Recognition Act to gender self-ID. My remarks were deemed so outrageous that the Center for Global Development (CGD) decided not to offer me further employment.

In 2019 a judge declared that my belief (that there are two sexes, that human beings can’t change sex, and that sex is important) did not count as a philosophical belief for the purposes of the Equality Act, that it was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The day after I lost my case JK Rowling tweeted about it, bringing me more public attention than I had bargained for. When my case became internationally newsworthy, lies were circulated about me, meant to discredit Rowling. Tweets and YouTube videos and even newspaper articles have said I “misgendered” or harassed a trans colleague. In fact, I had no trans colleagues, and I told CGD from the start that I would always treat people with respect and politeness in any professional situation.

In June 2020, I won an appeal to overturn the initial judgment. The President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal determined that my ordinary belief about male and female people, which I share with the vast majority of people in the world, is not only in line with the UK legal definition of the sexes, but also “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This meant I can continue my discrimination case against my ex-employer. It also means that other people can now seek legal redress if they are harassed or discriminated against, at work or as a service user, for believing that men are male and women are female. If people face workplace harassment for speaking up on this issue, they can point to the precedent of “Forstater”.

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The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

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Stonewall’s strategy of “no debate” on its push for gender self-ID has backfired. The unreasonable and unrelenting attacks on people as obviously calm and compassionate as Professor Kathleen Stock and JK Rowling have led more people to look again at the policies being promoted in the name of “trans inclusion”, which chip away at areas of life formerly designated female-only.

My case will be back in the Employment Tribunal starting on 7 March, three years to the day from when I lost my job. It has been a long, slow process to clear my name. And it is vital that I win this final stage — not just so I get justice, but also to demonstrate to employers that these rights don’t just exist on paper. You cannot disregard the usual frameworks of non-discrimination and respect for everyone’s human rights, just because someone points a finger and whispers “transphobe”. And employers should stop doing the bidding of organisations like Stonewall that tell them to do so.

By standing up to the gender bullies in whatever way we can, we are breaking through the culture of fear. My case and others have shone a light on areas of institutional capture. Harry Miller challenged the College of Policing over Humberside Police Force’s heavy-handed response to a complaint about his comical tweets. Keira Bell, a young detransitioned woman, brought a case against the NHS Tavistock gender-identity clinic challenging the experimental medical treatments being given to gender non-conforming children. Other cases are coming, most notably that of Allison Bailey, a barrister and a lesbian who is suing Stonewall, the influential LGBTQIA+ organisation, for colluding in a witch-hunt against her by her legal chambers.

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All these voices and so many others have brought the debate out into the open. As a result of that debate, the UK government ditched the proposal for gender self-ID (although Scotland is still planning to go ahead), and has commissioned an independent review of children’s gender-identity services. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK’s human rights law watchdog, intervened in my case to say that my belief is indeed protected. And it has gone on to change its position on gender self-ID laws.

If it wasn’t obvious before that my belief is “worthy of respect in a democratic society”, it is now.

One of the worst things about being a claimant in an employment tribunal is how it isolates you. People who know you professionally keep their distance. They imagine I might have done something awful to lead CGD to argue that I engaged in speech so offensive that it “causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act”. And I could not clear my name. My tribunal is the first chance for the full truth to be heard.

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It is perhaps worth noting that the organisation I worked for is the European subsidiary of a parent organisation based in Washington DC. The complaints by people who read my tweets came from the US. The consultants who investigated me were from the US, and so were the decision makers who decided to let me go.

Radical gender ideology arose in the campuses of elite North American universities and has spread to the UK, and other countries. This is not a positive cultural import. The idea of replacing sex with “gender identity” is institutional kryptonite, corrupting organisations, preventing people from speaking truthfully and recording data accurately. It turns organisations away from their principles, in ways that particularly harm women and children, even while allowing those organisations to wave a superficial flag of “inclusion”. This is an American import we should reject. We would be better off without it.

Local groups of gender critical feminists have sprung up throughout Scotland, from the Borders to the Highlands and Islands, and are making their mark both online and on the streets. Stickers, posters, postcards and suffragette ribbons all bear the same message for Nicola Sturgeon’s government: “Women Won’t Wheesht.”

As Covid restrictions ease and May’s local elections draw close, these women are ramping up their campaign to make the Scottish government think twice about its plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). Currently, if you want to legally change your gender in Scotland, medical evidence is required; you must have lived in your “acquired gender” for at least two years. The Scottish government’s proposed reforms would mean that no diagnosis or medical reports would be needed, and the period in which applicants must have lived in their acquired gender would be cut to three months.

In other words, self-identification of gender would be introduced. The SNP government is expected to reveal its draft legislation in the coming weeks. For Scotland’s gender-critical feminists, their fight has never been so urgent.

Many of these women describe themselves as “politically homeless”. Some are considering breaking the habit of a lifetime and not voting in May; others will spoil their ballots. Some are considering whether to vote for the new Alba party, which has pledged to protect and preserve the rights of women and girls. The Scottish Conservatives have also realised this is an issue on which they can appeal to female voters — several Conservative MSPs visited a demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament organised by For Women Scotland in September.

For my research published this week into what I term a Scottish “cooperative constellation” of gender-critical feminists, I spoke to a coalition of women that reaches across the independence/unionist divide and includes women from all sections of society and political tribes. Some began their feminist careers on Greenham Common. For younger members, this is their first step into the political public sphere.

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Putting aside what divides them, these women are united by concerns about the impact of the GRA reforms on women’s sex-based rights: the implications for women’s sport, refuges, prisons, and the myriad services achieved by feminist campaigners since the Seventies.

I carried out 18 in-depth interviews with politicians, researchers, journalists, bloggers, creative artists and grassroots campaigners — all of whom were promised anonymity. I asked all of them to disclose any abuse they had suffered due to their involvement in the constellation. After all, women’s livelihoods have been threatened because of their opinions on the GRA reform, and many involved in the debate are concerned for their personal safety.

What they had to say made for grim listening: they spoke to me of death and rape threats, demands that their employer sack them and attempts at “cancellation”. One interviewee described the response to an essay she posted online, in which she expressed her opinion that being a lesbian is the same as being same-sex attracted. “Almost minutes after it was published, I got a message saying, ‘I hope you get raped, or, better yet, killed. LOL’.” She also had another abuser post pictures of her home and her home address: “And this account was filled with things like, ‘Kill TERFs, TERFs don’t deserve rights. TERFs aren’t women’.” As another interviewee put it: “We seem to have become like the new witches, it’s like the new Salem”.

Of course, during lockdown the activities of this constellation of feminists were confined to social media. Women shared, debated and organised on Twitter, Facebook and sites like Mumsnet, where feminist forums offer a comparatively safe space for gender-critical discussion. Women could keep their anonymity but signal their stance by using the suffragette colours of purple, green and white. In recent months, David Lammy’s dismissal of gender critical women as “dinosaurs hoarding rights” has offered another eye-catching addition to Twitter handles and Mumsnet usernames: the T-Rex emoji.

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The term “cooperative constellation” comes from the literature surrounding a phenomenon of feminist cooperation that took place in the EU and Nordic countries in the Nineties and early Noughties. In order to achieve women’s rights, female politicians, researchers, activists, and policy advisors worked together across political divisions. The researchers provided the theory, while the activists and grassroots led demand for change, which policymakers and politicians could then use in their push for new legislation.

The cooperative constellation also, importantly, included — and continues to include — female members of the media. The women I interviewed for my project acknowledged how crucial it is to achieve mainstream press coverage of their concerns. In recent years, though, the growth of online commentary has meant that gender-critical voices are less reliant on  the mainstream media. The contemporary constellation in Scotland has expanded to include bloggers and writers with large online followings — including, of course, J.K. Rowling.

But that is not the only difference between today’s Scottish activists and those who came before. Unlike the cooperative feminists 20 years ago, these Scottish women are focused on slowing down policy change, asking policymakers to think more carefully about how proposed changes will impact the sex-based rights of women and girls. And, in comparison to other constellations — where the networks were often supported by national governments that desired an academic underpinning for their sex-equality ambitions — the Scottish feminists are acting as outsiders. Those members of the SNP, Scottish Greens and Scottish Labour — including Holyrood and Westminster politicians — who belong to the constellation are acting in direct contradiction of official party policy.

Although they come from all corners, the majority of the women I interviewed are largely positioned on the centre or Left of Scottish politics. They are women who have been used to supporting, and being supported by, institutions like the BBC, The Guardian and trade unions. Yet when they appealed to these organisations to discuss their concerns about GRA reform, not only did they find their worries dismissed, but they were also vilified and accused of transphobia. One interviewee who had raised her concerns on an email list for union activists was immediately expelled from the group. The heading of the email, sent to all members, was “Fucking transphobes, fuck off”.

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And as well as being rejected by their usual allies, the constellation has also been thoroughly snubbed by established women’s organisations in Scotland. Interviewees stated that they felt betrayed by organisations such as Engender or Rape Crisis, which do not represent their views. In fact, established women’s organisations were perceived to be in a feedback loop with the Scottish government, and to represent only a small section of Scottish women, with no interest in alternative points of view. It was frequently suggested that this was a necessary position, given their reliance on the government for funding. And so gender-critical feminists had felt compelled to start their own grassroots organisations, including For Women Scotland or Frontline Feminists Scotland.

As a result, they have found themselves vilified and abused. But they have organised, and are fighting back. For many there is a new sense of sisterhood and solidarity with women throughout the country. “It’s united people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience,” one interviewee told me. “That’s been one of the most rewarding things.”

With lockdown lifting, they are back out on the streets with their leaflets, ribbons, slates and dinosaurs. “It’s almost like a guerrilla network, getting out there instead of just sitting around talking”. Forget devolution — Nicola Sturgeon is about to discover there’s a new dividing line in Scottish politics.

The UK has left the European Union, but we remain a member of the Council of Europe. The CoE is an older and larger organisation — hence the inclusion of Russia and Turkey — and is built around the European Convention on Human Rights. This week’s meeting revealed just how empty some of those human rights have become.

The title of the resolution passed by its Parliamentary Assembly was noble enough — “Combating rising hate against LGBTI people in Europe” — but, as ever, the devil was in the detail. As well as conflating the UK, where LGB and trans people are well-protected, with the rather different situation in parts of Eastern Europe, the resolution quietly erased sex from its list of protected characteristics.

Deplorably, sex was not even mentioned in respect to refuge shelters. Victims, the CoE ruled, must be protected against “re-traumatisation on the grounds of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics” — but not their sex.

It then got worse: the resolution further demanded that member states “refuse to provide funding to local, regional or national authorities or other State or non-State actors that deny the human rights of LGBTI people, and to withdraw such funding if it has already been granted”. This was, in effect, a call for governments to turn their backs on single-sex provision.

Let’s be clear: the LGBTI community is made up of people whose human rights deserve to be protected. But other groups also have human rights, and sometimes rights need to be balanced. When vulnerable women need single-sex provision, they must not be expected to share with members of the opposite sex, however we might identify.

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It shouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility to create additional spaces for transsexuals like me so as to assure everyone’s rights. Yes, it might cost more money — but this resolution was driven far more by ideology than economics. A whole paragraph was devoted to stamping out what its author perceived to be the “highly prejudicial anti-gender, gender-critical and anti-trans narratives which reduce the fight for the equality of LGBTI people to what these movements deliberately mis-characterise as ‘gender ideology’ or ‘LGBTI ideology’”.

It was the kind of statement trotted out in student debates — and you could be forgiven for thinking its impact will be just as small. After all, CoE Resolutions are not binding on member states, and I suspect that few Europeans care enough to know that its Parliamentary Assembly even exists, less still the business conducted by the 324 representatives drawn from national parliaments (including 18 UK members from the Commons and the Lords).

The truth, however, is that it does wield an influence over us all: when issues such as gender identity reach national parliaments, CoE resolutions allow politicians to present their case as a fait accompli. Indeed, when Maria Miller first introduced the concept of gender self-identification to the House of Commons in 2016, she cited: “Resolution 2048 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.”

That isn’t to say that all politicians subscribe to the CoE’s transgender agenda. On Tuesday, five members of the UK delegation tabled 10 amendments in an attempt to rescue the resolution. Just three managed to find their way into the final text. The first, Amendment 11, crucially inserted the word ‘sex’ into paragraph 12.1:

“amend criminal legislation as necessary to ensure that its provisions with respect to hate crimes clearly cover all offences committed against a person or group of persons based on their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics, include proportionate and dissuasive sanctions, protect victims’ rights and make provision for them to receive compensation”.

Amendments 12 and 13 ensured that sex would be protected elsewhere in reference to the criminal law.

In a powerful yet conciliatory speech, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi introduced the 10 amendments. She skewered the most egregious failings of the resolution and the accompanying report that has been forwarded by Fourat Ben Chikha, a Green politician from Belgium. Antoniazzi was clear in her objectives: “We need transparency… I hope to amend the resolution to reflect the reality of the situation.”

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Why indeed had Ben Chikha shackled the UK with Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation and Turkey when reporting on hate in Europe? Without any context, anyone reading his proposal might reasonably imagine that those five countries were hotbeds of anti-trans hatred. In his report, Ben Chikha cited a 2021 Annual Review by ILGA Europe — an NGO which advocates for the “human rights and equality for LGBTI people at European level”. The ILGA review does contain a raft of tables and charts — but their evidence points to a reality somewhat different from the fantasy Ben Chikha presented to the Assembly.

As Antoniazzi pointed out: “The [ILGA] Review links the data source, Rainbow Europe. In the rank order of 49 European countries, the UK was placed fifth in respect of hate crime and hate speech. I want to underline that, it was fifth.” Not the fifth worst, but the fifth best. The table cited by Antoniazzi andplaced Malta at the top, with the UK only four places behind, ahead of France, Germany and Ben Chikha’s Belgium. Turkey, Poland and Russia languished at the foot of the table.

What these figures actually mean is open to discussion: do they reflect law and policy, or the experience of LGBTI people in society? But either way, there was nothing to suggest that the UK had a particular problem. The UK nation was defamed in this report, and Antoniazzi was correct to point it out.

Lord Blencathra, who spoke after Antoniazzi, was equally forthright:

“In my years serving in this honourable assembly, I can say that the report by Mr Ben Chikha is unique. Unique, because I have never before seen such a biased distorted and utterly wrong work of fiction than his comments about the United Kingdom. If [the resolution] goes unamended then it will bring this assembly into disrepute… What it appears to be suggesting is that UK society suffers from bigotry by allowing an open discussion about introducing new laws about self-identification of gender.”

Even worse, perhaps, is the message it sends to LGBTI people suffering appalling treatment in Eastern Europe. In January 2019, it was revealed that around 40 LGBTI people had been imprisoned in just one month — two of whom reportedly died under torture. How can the situation in the UK possibly be comparable? Women speaking up for their rights in the UK should never be conflated with concentration camps in Chechnya — but that, it seems, was Ben Chikha’s intent.

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By Tish Still

Antoniazzi’s proposed remedy was straightforward: “Delete the following words, and the United Kingdom.” What followed next was anything but. It seemed at first that the amendment would be discarded without even being put to the vote. Antoniazzi needed the support of at least 10 colleagues. But under Covid regulations, this was a hybrid session and, in a display of anti-democratic farce, those logging in remotely were unable to register their support.

This led to a dramatic intervention by Lord Foulkes who interrupted the debate to express his frustration: “We raised points of order and we were ignored.” After he was supported by an unlikely alliance of Jeremy Corbyn and Lord Howell, a vote was eventually taken.

Yet it was lost by a margin of 61 to 24 — and the resolution was subsequently carried. Despite all the speeches, and all the facts and evidence presented from the UK, the verdict of the Parliamentary Assembly was blunt: “The Assembly strongly condemned ‘the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people for several years’ notably in Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United Kingdom.”

So for now, at least, we can only take solace in the fact that the arguments were made and there was a debate. Perhaps even more significantly, the debate was recorded for posterity, so that it can be rekindled as soon as it reaches Westminster, Holyrood and elsewhere. For make no mistake: this resolution will reach these quarters, where it will be used by those who hope to paint the UK as a country riddled by anti-trans prejudice. But when that happens, there will be one glaring omission in their arsenal: the truth.

Until recently, legitimate reasons to suppress books had been diminishing: obscenity or blasphemy had disappeared. They appear to be increasing again, and expanding out of the realm of the law. I don’t think we should worry about books that are withdrawn because they cross, or prove to have crossed, some legal barrier. When, this year, Alice Sebold’s rape memoir Lucky was withdrawn, it was because the man she accused, and who was convicted on the testimony she then adapted for publication, was shown to have been innocent. That would always have happened, long before the phrase “cancel culture” was coined.

But a more ominous loss was Blake Bailey’s life of the novelist Philip Roth. The American moralising critics had been gunning for Roth himself for some time, on the grounds of supposed misogyny, both in his books and in his real-life relationships with women. Fortunately, the greatest American novelist of the last 60 years is, as yet, out of their reach. Bailey himself was an easier target. He was the author of magnificent lives of John Cheever and Richard Yates, and the Roth biography was magisterial — but too forgiving in tone. And so allegations of sexual harassment, assault and even rape against the biographer were hauled up. Although not yet proved, and apparently not the subject of legal proceedings, they were enough for Bailey to be dropped by his agent and American publisher.

Is it ever acceptable for a legally unobjectionable book to be cancelled, simply because an influential group dislikes its ideas or its author? This is a question that has plagued the publishing industry this year, and will continue to plague it.

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A temporarily successful cancellation was of the journalist Julie Burchill’s polemic on wokeness. It is fair to say that if you agree to publish Julie Burchill, you should know what you’re signing up to. The ride will be exhilarating, but sometimes bumpy. This apparently came as news to Little, Brown. Burchill got into an argument on Twitter with a younger, Muslim journalist. During the exchange, Burchill raised a historically verified fact about the age of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, and made energetically tactless descriptions about the man the religion venerates. In March, she had to pay damages for defamation. Although this had no bearing on the contents of the book Little, Brown had signed up, they said that she had “crossed the line” and they would not publish it.

Like many writers, I’ve had to admit defamation in the past. 20 years ago, you would have been considered dangerously insane to have suggested that Harper Collins drop my next novel because I’d been rude about a lady artist in the Spectator. Fortunately, there are still some who think this way. Burchill’s book was picked up by a small press, and those who agree with her, or indeed those who, like me, very much enjoy disagreeing with her, can buy her book on the Woke Trials from Academica Press for £24.95.

If you can find a bookshop stocking it, that is — one underrated feature of cancel culture is that quite ordinary booksellers took to announcing in principled tones that they would not sell work they disagreed with. Two reasonable but sceptical books on trans issues by Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock were, it was suggested, having difficulty being displayed or even stocked by shops. I doubt it did the authors any harm. Amazon was not to be budged.

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What is behind these attempts to remove individual books from circulation? And why does publishing, even for a moment, indulge the protesters who want to make the memoirs of, say, a senior member of a conservative US administration like Mike Pence unpublishable? Why are they, or the accusers of Blake Bailey, not told to go away or, if they are within the publishing industry, to find another area to work in?

Some of the scenes that have taken place are unarguably risible. The Canadian polemicist Jordan Peterson has a devoted following for his conservative hard-work-and-self-respect talks and essays. Robust prescriptions of Canadian Protestantism aren’t to everybody’s taste. The New York Times amusingly described him as the “custodian of the patriarchy”, not reflecting that the patriarchy might not need one. When Penguin Random House announced plans to publish his new book, protesters within the Canadian office forced them to hold what was described as an “emotional” meeting. One junior employee explained that publishing the book would “negatively affect their non-binary friend”. PRH went ahead, perhaps foreseeing the difficulties in consulting all the non-binary friends of junior employees about proposed signings and publications.

There are, then, reasons to be hopeful. There has been little attempt to cancel, rather than criticise, writers of the past. VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth are still in print; Dickens, widely arraigned for his treatment of his wife, remains a stalwart of the classics lists. The revelation that people who have voted for the Conservative Party have, in the past, written good novels is not yet the universal object of horror. Even the dropping of very controversial current day authors has created opportunities: the American publisher Skyhorse snapped up Bailey’s book, as it had the Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the hitherto blameless comic writers Garrison Keillor and Woody Allen, after similar campaigns against their supposed inappropriate behaviour.

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The direction of travel, however, is clear. We may be living in an age of transition, like the 1840s, when the liberal and relaxed means of expression of the previous age were snuffed out by a fervent and self-righteous rigidity. Mozart’s Così fan Tutte was dropped because it failed to draw an acceptable moral conclusion about marriage. Philip Roth’s novels may suffer the same fate. Will we who came to intellectual maturity in the Eighties and Nineties come to be stared at in the street, like the aged Thomas De Quincey, still off his face in staid 1850s Edinburgh? Well, we shall find out.

This is not a development proved or disproved by individual cases, and when campaigns of cancellation are waged against the million-selling Jordan Peterson, publishers have good reasons not to give way. Junior staff of publishers have been upset about working on J.K. Rowling’s books — she has committed the crime, among other things, of defending lesbians who have said that they don’t want to have sex with anyone with a penis. There are other junior staff to be hired, if that’s how they feel. For the moment.

Rather, we will know the truth of the development in years to come, when we can only guess at the careers that didn’t take place, and the opinions in society which, however widespread and ordinary, were deemed unpublishable. Even now, it is impossible to imagine that a novel, however brilliantly witty, could now be published by a good publisher if it made any jokes at the expense of a minority. And it may be that publishers, in a state of anxiety about offending, are pre-emptively walking away from very large parts of society.

I spoke to a couple of British editors recently who said, to their mild surprise, that they had no immediate plans to publish any novel by a man; to confirm this possible tendency, I am currently judging a new prize for novels of any sort, in which 49 out of the submitted 56 are by women. Whether publishers are turning away from half the human race, or that half of the human race is abandoning a way of life there’s no money in and nothing but disapproval to be expected, is arguable. The final result of an undeniable culture of cancellation is a terrible impoverishment of diversity, of fruitful debate, of the exploration and expression of different lives, different points of view, different ways of living in the world. That matters.

There was backlash from religious groups, calling the move “eugenics”. But was it? The word “eugenics” can be used to refer to things like mitochondrial donation, insofar as it means something like “efforts to remove ‘harmful’ genes from the gene pool”. But the classic example of eugenics are things like the Nazi programme of forced sterilisation; a programme that did awful things to people against their will.

Using the term “eugenics” to refer to both was, I think, a semi-deliberate tactic. Opponents of mitochondrial donation were trying to associate those evil things in people’s minds with the more complex cases. That doesn’t mean that mitochondrial donation is automatically right. But the fact that a loose definition of the word “eugenics” can be used to apply to both it and Nazi murders does not make it necessarily wrong.

A similar sort of tactic appears to being deployed in the ongoing debate over the Government’s proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy. 

It was not that many years ago that homosexuality was viewed as a mental illness requiring curing: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed same-sex attraction as a psychiatric disorder until 1973. And as I’ve written before, there’s not much evidence that you can change someone’s sexual orientation, while the methods used to do it have often been brutal: zapping people with electric shocks while showing them homoerotic images; chemical castration; even lobotomy, as recently as 1969.

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“Conversion therapy” is, therefore, rightly held up as something unacceptable: the classic example of conversion therapy is a gay man or lesbian woman being forced, against his or her will, to submit to something approaching torture, in an almost certainly unsuccessful attempt to change his or her sexual orientation.

The Government’s legislation, though, refers not just to efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation, but also to efforts to change their gender identity. And I’m concerned that, just as with the word “eugenics”, using the term “conversion therapy” like this stretches it to beyond the point of usefulness.

Of course if someone is trans, they should not be told that they are not — or told that they are inferior, or defective. But sexual orientation is a fairly stable and well-defined concept: we know what is meant by being sexually attracted to one sex or another or both, and, on the whole, people’s sexual orientation remains the same throughout their adult lives. Importantly, also, if someone does change their sexual orientation, all they need to do is start dating people of the appropriate sex.

That’s not true of gender identity. While there clearly are many people who don’t identify as their biological sex, exactly what is meant by a “gender identity” is unclear. The Human Rights Campaign defines it as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither”. How one feels is important, but it is subjective — and unlike sexual attraction it’s not tied to obvious behaviours, such as choice of sexual partner.

It’s also not clear that it’s stable. While some young people are clear from a very young age that they do not identify as the sex they were born in, and remain so until adulthood, that’s not true of everyone. According to several medical textbooks, perhaps as many as 85% to 90% of prepubescent children who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria — that is, severe discomfort in their birth sex — no longer do by adolescence, although they do say that if those children are still dysphoric in early puberty, it is “almost certainly permanent”.

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And, crucially, the decision about whether a young person is trans or not can be much more consequential and irreversible than the decision about whether they’re gay or not. Full transitioning may involve hormones, drugs to delay puberty, and surgery.

All of which may be absolutely necessary and right; there are plenty of examples of young people who transitioned and became much happier and healthier. But the combination of an unstable concept and a major, consequential life decision means that we need to be careful about deciding whether someone, especially a young person, is “really” trans or not.

That’s why we should be concerned about the use of “conversion therapy” as an umbrella term. Of course, if there are therapists telling trans people that being trans is shameful or sinful, or that it is a defect that needs to be purged, then that is wrong, and those people should be punished. But I don’t think it’s very common.

The Government’s own research refers to two main kinds of conversion therapy: spiritual, “pray the gay away” versions, and “psychological methods” such as talking therapies. About 5% of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the UK have been offered conversion therapy, mainly of the spiritual kind, usually because their sexual orientation conflicts with their community’s religious beliefs.

There is much less research into how common gender identify conversion therapy is. But the Government’s assessment does say that “a much higher percentage of transgender respondents (29%) than cisgender respondents (15%) said their therapy had been conducted by healthcare professionals”.

That would make sense, if some therapists are assessing that some patients are mistaken about their transgender status, and offering them alternative routes — for instance, watching and waiting, or treating some mental health condition that they have — and patients are unhappy at the lack of affirmation of their condition. And often such assessments are reasonable: gender dysphoria is often found alongside other conditions, such as autism. There are also other conditions, such as borderline personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder, which can lead to patients having unstable senses of self. While it’s important to listen to patients, that doesn’t mean always assuming that they’re right in their self-diagnosis. 

The Government’s proposed legislation does make room for therapists to “support a person who is questioning if they are LGBT”. But as one GP says, “lots of my patients are not questioning; they are very assertive that they are trans”. Sometimes simply affirming a patient’s, especially a child’s, beliefs about his or her identity, is not the right thing to do.

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Perhaps the safeguards in the proposed law will protect doctors and therapists who want to be more cautious about affirming patients’ gender identity in every case. But some therapists are clearly concerned: the GP quoted above goes on to say that “The way this is worded at the moment, I could end up in prison.” Surely it will not come to that, but it would be deeply concerning if there was a chilling effect on medical professionals’ willingness to talk about gender to their patients.

Like the term “eugenics”, the term “conversion therapy” is powerful: it summons up images of torture, of homophobia, of religious and institutional abuse. And just as with eugenics, that power needs to be directed carefully. The arguments should never be “because we use the same term to describe them as we used to describe Nazi atrocities”. 

Of course, there may sometimes be excellent reasons to affirm children’s gender identities, rather than challenge them. I suspect it may be best to let clinicians use their best judgment, in some cases. But we should be careful about using the term “conversion therapy”. Something has gone wrong if doctors are worried about going to prison for discussing the best treatment for their patients.

But it’s not just individual mothers and daughters who do this. It is also reproduced in the women’s movement. In American Electra, the feminist writer Susan Faludi argues that it is a central feature: matricide is a core dynamic in feminism from the Twenties onward.

“The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”, wrote Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976). Faludi quotes Betty Friedan, perhaps the quintessential rejecter of bourgeois domesticity as a desirable role for women, who said: “I didn’t want to be like my mother”.

And this dynamic, Faludi argues, has translated into “a persistent barrenness” within feminism: that is, a rejection not just of individual mothers but of the movement’s ability to create a heritage over time. Instead, each generation rejects the one that went before, endlessly reproducing this second-wave feminist scorn for endlessly victimised, unfree, martyred and unsatisfied mothers – both literal and also political. It’s a push-me-pull-you dynamic that both rejects whatever came before in the women’s movement, while also longing for an ongoing, motherly warmth and acceptance.

Nowhere is this battle over the nature (or, perhaps, the possibility) of a feminist legacy more evident than in contemporary arguments around trans identity. Shon Faye’s new book on “transgender liberation”, The Transgender Issue, argues this inheritance with energy and clarity. Meanwhile, in what it leaves half-said or unsaid, it also demonstrates it.

In general terms, the book delivers what you’d expect, given gushing blurbs written by Judith Butler, Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones: a bog-standard “intersectional” treatise. It abounds in the expected namechecks of standard “marginalised” groups, gestures in familiar ways at the evils of “capitalism” and evinces standard woke opinions on prostitution, prisons and immigration.

The Transgender Issue: an argument for justice is written with an op-ed journalist’s persuasive energy, in a style that (for anyone familiar with the so-called “Terf wars”) at times egregiously begs often hotly-contested questions. For example, proposed legislation that would replace biological sex in law with self-identified “gender identity”, a change with far-reaching conceptual and political implications, is breezily characterised as “a more humane process for gender recognition”.

But Faye writes well. Anyone seeking a primer on “trans-inclusive” and “gender critical” arguments could do worse than read this book alongside Helen Joyce’s Trans. The book’s interest lies in its ambivalent relation to an older generation of feminism.

Faye draws on second-wave writers and radical feminist history, to argue that far from representing a repudiation of the second-wave legacy, trans-activism is its inheritrix. To this end, The Transgender Issue quotes Andrea Dworkin’s approving 1974 description, in Woman Hating, of how new research and fertility technology “challenges the notion that there are two discrete biological sexes” and “threatens to transform the traditional biology of sex difference into the radical biology of sex similarity”. Elsewhere, Faye correctly points out that disagreements over the place of trans women in feminist groups go all the way back to the Seventies.

And, indeed, this matriarchal lineage is difficult to dispute, when it was this generation of feminists who first argued that “sex” and “gender” are separable. Andrea Dworkin stated in Woman Hating that “man” and “woman” are […] cultural constructs […] reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming”. What Dworkin outlines here is, today, settled opinion among pronouns-in-bio online leftists.

Against what Dworkin called the “totalitarian” idea of “man” and “woman”, other second-wave radical feminists imagined all of us liberated from the givens of biology. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), for example, dreamed of a future in which women had been wholly liberated from reproduction by a mix of extra-uterine gestation and collectivised childcare.

From this perspective, if we admit of any relationship whatsoever between biology and wider social norms or structures, women are at risk of being subordinated again: relegated once more to (as Rich puts it) “the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr”. And if there’s no relationship between biology and identity, why shouldn’t a trans woman be — as Faye argues — also “female”?

Like the secondwavers, Faye rejects the “conservative” idea that women are “vessels for reproduction”. The Transgender Issue situates trans liberation as a logical extension of feminist call for bodily autonomy and particularly for safe and legal abortion. In Faye’s view, both abortion and gender medicine are forms of resistance to “[c]onservative ideological positions about gender roles and the degree to which an individual is entitled to autonomy over their body”.

Faye’s argument for “transfeminism” as a daughter of the second wave, then, has merit. It continues this matrilineal dynamic in one further way: by embracing the “matricidal” dynamic described by Susan Faludi.

Mothers have only the most tenuous presence in The Transgender Issue. Only two get more than passing, warm mention: Faye’s own mother (in the dedication), and the supportive mother of a transgender-identified child.

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Mothers as a political group are (in Faye’s characteristically tendentious style) airbrushed out. Reflecting on why British feminism in particular is resistant to the inclusion of trans women, Faye blames this on all manner of things, from a hostile press, to (somehow) the British Empire, while leaving out perhaps the most central rallying-point for “gender critical” activism: Mumsnet, or as it’s sometimes dubbed by those infuriated by its members’ stubborn wrongthink, “Prosecco 4chan”.

Mumsnet’s feminism pages have played a central role in gender critical activism politics for over a decade, a fact not unconnected to Mumsnetters’ (usually) shared experience of maternity. It is, after all, more difficult to take seriously the idea that “woman” is an identity, when you’ve experienced pregnancy, childbirth and the shift in outlook and social role that comes with motherhood. But for Faye, the possibility that mothers might have experiences in common, and views of their own, doesn’t merit airtime.

In The Transgender Issue, mothers appear as bit-part players. Some are kind blunderers who don’t understand their children’s identity needs; others are violently transphobic. Inasmuch we appear as a class at all in connection with the female reproductive role, we’re either gender-diverse “people with uteruses” (ie not mothers), or else women in need of abortion services so they can avoid becoming mothers.

Again, in keeping with second-wave feminism, Faye is keen to sever any connection between women and gestation. In one footnote, the notion that pregnancy is a women’s issue is dismissed as “conservative and regressive”. With that, a key locus of specifically female political interest is reframed as a set of fertility services, that can and should be detached from “woman” as a concept, and whose “postcode lottery” availability represents yet another injustice to the trans community.

Shon Faye’s “transgender liberation”, then, sits in intimately ambivalent mother/daughter relationship with the feminism that birthed it. It embraces the conceptual legacy of second-wave feminism; then, in accordance with that heritage, also rejects motherhood and maternity. And, at the same time rejecting its own second-wave heritage, which (we gather) wasn’t nearly radical enough but instead merely accepted a set of minor improvements to the conditions for bourgeois women under capitalism.

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Nor is it enough, in Faye’s view, to replicate such marginal gains for well-off, white, transgender people. Such activism (which the book exemplifies in Stonewall’s corporate “diversity” activism) affords at best superficial improvements without addressing The System that claims the right to determine who is or isn’t “acceptably trans under capitalism”.

For Faye, the real prize is smashing this underlying system, which the book identifies with “patriarchy”. Achieving this seems to mean abolition of all boundaries or limits, a vision that includes ending “rigid” ideas of biological sex, dissolving hierarchical relations such as “the state’s monopoly on legal force through policing, prisons and migrant detention centres” and ending any political structure — such as national borders — that imposes harsh divisions of any kind.

To replace this “patriarchal” regime, Faye envisages one of pure nurture. This order, we gather, would be unstintingly welcoming to the vulnerable, impoverished, addicted or mentally unwell. It would be endlessly adaptive to individuals’ specific, contextual, identity-driven needs. And it would be boundlessly giving with medical, housing and therapeutic resources – up to and including laser hair removal and gamete-freezing, resources certainly not universally available to other groups on the NHS.

It ought, Faye declares, “to be the state’s obligation to support trans people, not the other way around”. Even as it rhetorically sidesteps literal mothers, then, true liberation, is a political regime that sets out liberate women from the need to be mothers, by itself embodying the once-archetypal maternal qualities of empathy, nurture and support.

Faye characterises as “frankly unhinged” Germaine Greer’s argument in The Whole Woman that transgender women are engaged in a form of symbolic matricide. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say Greer didn’t go far enough. That is, it’s not just transfeminism that’s engaged in symbolic matricide, it’s pretty much all of it, from the second wave onwards.

Other strands have, of course, emerged over many decades of sometimes rancorous feminist debate. But Shon Faye makes a convincing case for transgender activism as the matricidal inheritrix of a profoundly matricidal strand in that debate.

And perhaps the regime of therapeutic totalitarianism The Transgender Issue proposes, to replace our current social order, is the true inheritance of this matricidal liberation. For since the likes of Dworkin and Firestone were writing, those women who didn’t want to be like their martyred mothers have increasingly swapped caring for toddlers favour of entry into public and working life.

In tandem, the care of even very young children has since been increasingly outsourced to institutional providers. Many of these young people are now adults: generations for whom, increasingly commonly, the earliest infant experiences of nurture are fused with a more impersonal, institutional authority.

Perhaps it’s natural that such adults would dream of a political regime on the same template of nurturing authoritarianism. And perhaps, too, Shon Faye’s vision of a politics so motherly no one need ever want, compete or quarrel again is the true contemporary legacy of the second wave’s mummy issues.

The same year, the Emperor Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens, making 529AD a symbolic turning-point: the year pre-Christian philosophy lost its place as the dominant worldview. For the thousand-odd years that followed, institutions such as Monte Cassino represented the centres of knowledge production, which from then until relatively recently was inseparable from the Christian faith.

It took the philosophers of the 18^th century to unpick intellectual life from religion. The completeness of their eventual victory is demonstrated by the very term “Enlightenment”, which frames everything that preceded it as darkness.

Even the word “medieval”, a coinage of modern intellectual historians, implies a sort of historical flyover country between the enlightened ancient and modern worlds. And our modern world was only freed from this no man’s land of superstition, squalor, and theocratic violence by the brave rejection of religious authority, and rediscovery of the classical learning whose light was for so long hidden under Christianity’s bushel. Or that’s how the story goes, anyway.

Another few centuries later, we once again live in an age characterised by the sort of disagreement Benedict or Justinian would have recognised: a conflict as profound as “Apollo vs Jesus”, or “Church Authority vs Science”. Except this time, it’s the Enlightenment on the back foot  as new ideas and beliefs overwhelm the old. As these theories have come to engulf not just academia but growing swathes of our political life, increasingly agitated commentators predict a new dimming of the light, perhaps even the end of western civilisation itself.

Reading Material Girls, Kathleen Stock’s new book on the increasingly radioactive transgender debate, my sense is that prophecies of apocalypse may be overblown. But also that the Age of Reason is indeed firmly in the rear-view mirror — a fact that presents the author herself with some difficulties.

Stock herself is a professor of analytic philosophy at the University of Sussex, and approaches the discussion of trans activism with the patient lucidity you’d expect of someone immersed in that most reasonable of disciplines. She defines her terms: “sex”, “gender”, “gender identity” and so on. She clarifies some of the things she is not saying, such as that trans people are delusional, or lying, or predators. She provides a brief outline of some key moments in cultural (and particularly feminist) history that have contributed to trans activism. And she presents, in relatively neutral terms, her understanding of the position she wishes to argue against.

Then, having defined her terms and excluded confounding issues, she argues that humans cannot literally change sex but only “gender” — and that conflating the two has a number of damaging effects.

Having, as it were, set out her own intellectual stall, and provided a whistle-stop tour of the feminist and queer-theory lenses usually applied to this debate, she employs neither. Instead, she borrows from her own area of academic expertise: the philosophy of fiction. Trans identification is a form of immersion in fiction, she argues, which can enrich human life in many ways. It’s both real and not-real.

“Immersion” is also both real and not-real: a state of awareness halfway between full belief and full disbelief. Both these states matter in different ways. We may be absorbed by a film at the cinema, and find a particularly good one deeply satisfying and life-enhancing, but that wouldn’t stop us from leaving in a hurry if the fire alarm goes off and the room fills with smoke. But, she suggests, recent activism has sought legislative changes that in effect compel everyone to act as if we believe these fictions in all ways identical to reality.

And this, she argues, has negative effects, especially for women and same-sex attracted people, because underlying realities continue to be politically salient. Redefining them as unmentionable or irrelevant does not make them go away, any more than making it socially unacceptable to mention the smell of smoke would do anything to prevent a fire at the cinema.

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To illustrate, consider the now-notorious case of “Karen White”. This individual, a convicted sex offender, is in all respects physiologically male but was moved to a women’s prison after claiming to identify as a woman. White then sexually assaulted several female inmates.

In her commitment to free speech, good-faith debate, clear and careful argument and upholding reason over dogma, Stock writes faithfully in the tradition of the Enlightenment. The example of Karen White is a textbook instance of the warning sounded in On Miracles by one of that era’s foremost thinkers, the humanist Voltaire: “Once your faith […] persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life […] Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

But here, exactly, lies the rub. The activism she seeks to challenge is the political wing of a contemporary cultural movement committed to dismantling the Enlightenment’s intellectual foundations.

As you’d expect from an analytic philosopher grounded in Enlightenment moral and intellectual priors, Stock wants us to see the world as it is. As she puts it: “Features of the world, and our collective human interests in them, are not arbitrary, and that’s what we should be trying to make concepts responsive to”.

But her antagonists dissent from this basic premise: as they see it, our ideas about the world do help to create “the world as it is”; and to make matters worse, it is arbitrary. What emerges in Material Girls is a tussle between these radically mutually incompatible understandings of the relation between knowledge and power.

When University of Edinburgh students recently censured the anthropology lecturer Neil Thin, they saw the aim of studying as “to learn how to decolonise our thinking and create an inclusive society and environment”. It’s a view that more closely resembles the medieval fusion of intellectual study and religious faith than it does the critical Enlightenment stance that supplanted it.

But for Stock, knowledge is what matters, while power can and should be relegated to background enabling condition for the production of more and better knowledge. So, for example, the “main point” of universities is in her view “to produce and disseminate socially useful knowledge”.

And yet the most compelling section of Stock’s book concerns, in fact, precisely the operations of power: specifically, of those powers (including some at her own university) currently going all out to suppress her worldview in favour of their own.

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She lists, for example, the use of institutional power to enforce “preferred pronouns”, and social taboos against “misgendering” in educational contexts. She further details what she characterises as “propaganda” employed by activists in pursuit of their political aims: statistical sleight of hand, emotive talk of suicide risks, and the growing institutional popularity of the startlingly pseudo-religious Transgender Day of Remembrance.

And even as she expertly wields the discursive tools of the Age of Reason — its careful logic, efforts at good-faith representation of the opposing argument, and so on — to dissect this emerging paradigm, Stock herself deftly (and enjoyably) spikes her own guns. She does this rhetorically, through acerbic wit, outbreaks of exasperation (“Frankly, this is mad”) or first-person interjections into otherwise dispassionate analysis.

The same implicit acknowledgement of the limits to rational analysis emerges even more powerfully in her account of the “gender-critical” resistance to trans activist policy capture, in which self-organised groups of activists “held meetings, made websites and wrote blog posts, marshalling their tiny resources highly effectively against well-embedded organisations like Stonewall, Mermaids and the Scottish Trans Alliance”.

Somehow, by dint of determination, these groups pushed back against well-funded and politically connected lobbies to effect meaningful change. In other words: it wasn’t reasonable persuasion as such that moved the needle. It was leaning as hard as possible on every available lever of political power.

This isn’t just about those wicked postmodernists (of which I probably qualify as a member). It’s more that we are now, as a culture, losing such faith as we ever collectively had in facts and reason. In its most grounded version, this manifests as a dizzying discourse of political claim and counter-claim, all supposedly backed by objective statistics. At its more baroque end it drives the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. The point is that it’s not just angry students with “woke” ideas who think reality is old hat: it’s everyone.

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By Mary Harrington

The first Benedictine abbey was built over the ruins of a Temple of Apollo, and a thousand years later the monuments of Christianity found themselves sidelined by a renewed worship of Reason. Today, once again, we’re seeing Reason dethroned, by a form of cultural criticism that first used the Enlightenment’s own weapons against it, and is now committed to demolishing its altars and erecting its own in the rubble.

I’m unconvinced that this new paradigm can be effectively contested using the tools of the old one. Stock’s analysis is razor-sharp, in Enlightenment terms, and her prose is finely-honed. But it doesn’t matter how exquisitely crafted your knife is, if you’re bringing it to a gunfight you’re still going to lose.

For our emerging post-Enlightenment politics has abandoned even the pretence of persuasion when it comes to pursuing cultural and political change. Today’s modus operandi is a pincer approach characterised by policy capture backed by the threat of social sanction, whether enforced by HR departments or by punitive online mobs. And evidence so far – including that cited by Stock — suggests this works just as well in defence of “reality” as in undermining it.

What doesn’t work is pretending we all still agree on what reality is. For that, as the postmodernists are fond of pointing out, you also need power.

But while it may feel like mainstream culture has gone down the gender rabbit hole with bewildering speed, the enabling conditions have been gathering force for some time.

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In 2004, on the soundtrack to the Disney family comedy Ella Enchanted, Amanda Remanda and Bryan Adams sang: “Believe the voice inside of you, live out your dreams and make them true”. This sentiment is so common across children’s movies that songs voicing it are difficult to tell apart: we can transform our public selves if we only believe hard enough. But it wasn’t until the noughties that this idea crossed the line from being a metaphor about hope and perseverance to beings something that felt achievable, as they say, IRL.

I’m old enough to have got all the way to my late teens without the internet. But as a not-wholly-heterosexual and not-at-all-comfortable-in-my-own-skin teenager in the late Nineties, I fell deeply in love with the online world the moment I discovered it. Here was a social space, in which I could just be ‘me’, a disembodied consciousness, engaging with others like me purely through the medium of words. It was exhilarating.

MySpace was founded the year before Ella Enchanted came out, and Facebook the same year. Sebastian happened (I think) the following year, existed approximately 2005-2008 (though most of that decade is a bit of a blur) and would never have been a thing without the then-nascent phenomenon of social media.

In search of ‘my people’, I fell feet-first into a ‘genderqueer’ subculture that’s well-developed now. If I were in my early twenties today, I’d doubtless have a full bore ‘non-binary’ identity, complete with flag, fancy pronouns and a raft of internet friends lining up to validate me becoming my authentic self.

In the noughties, though, this subculture was just a tiny corner of the wild, emerging world of online communities. In its London incarnation, it had two hubs: one weekly bar night, and one corner of a then-popular lesbian messageboard. We’d all meet up offline for beer and chat, but the lion’s share of the culture-building happened online, via all the classic traits of an online subculture: in-jokes, micro-celebrities, sacred truths, fantasies and friendships and spectacular messageboard fights.

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For someone who was, like me, uneasy in the End of History normie world of globalisation, Jamie Oliver and the New Labour Third Way, it felt liberating. Online, you could be anyone you wanted. Someone who was, in real life, a pudgy woman with a moonface and a buzz-cut could be magically transformed, via the collective story we wove on that messageboard, into a brooding hybrid of James Dean and Oscar Wilde.

In 2005, hardly anyone was Very Online enough to have a whole parallel internet persona who came out IRL only among kindred spirits. But times change: between 2005 and 2015, the average amount of time teenagers spend online every week tripled. Today, by the time kids reach their teens, they spend an average of 20 hours a week online.

And it’s not just the kids: in 2005, the average UK adult spent around 10 hours a week online, but that doubled over the next decade to 20 hours. This year, under lockdown, average internet usage is nearly 30 hours a week. As you might expect, the Very Online approach to identities and social groups is no longer a fringe activity.

And as it goes mainstream, the costs are becoming more visible too. Last week, detransitioner Keira Bell won her case challenging the Tavistock Clinic’s ‘affirmative’ treatment model for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria. Bell recounts a now-common story: a child who didn’t fit normative social stereotypes about how boys and girls behave and, once she reached her teens, went looking online for her ‘people’.

But, unlike me, Bell grew up in a world where we’re all used to creating ‘selves’ largely divorced from our physical bodies. Today, we’ve grown used to digital social lives where we can edit, control and curate our selves to suit how we feel on the inside.

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So where I found a tiny subculture of those who felt at odds with sex stereotypes and their bodies, Keira Bell was greeted by 15 years’ worth of mass acculturation to this avatar-first understanding of ‘identity’. She was embraced by an international, well-networked digital community, dedicated to promoting the idea that our ‘selves’ are self-created and independent of our bodies, and backed up by serious lobbying money and a well-developed medical infrastructure.

This identity-first vision of selfhood, forged in the disembodied online world, was an exciting novelty for me. For millions of now-adult children of the internet age, though, it’s baked into their worldviews as a core paradigm for reality. But the problem it faces is that once you take this paradigm offline, it doesn’t really work.

As the first incarnation of Facebook was launching in 2004, Amanda and Bryan were singing to the impressionable tween watchers of Ella Enchanted:

Through your eyes, I may see
With your love, you set me free
Wishes can come true
If you believe

It might seem unfair to subject something as ephemeral as a second-rate Disney soundtrack to a close reading. But bear with me, because the core idea expressed by this dreary ditty is contradictory in ways that have wider repercussions. On the one hand it claims: believe hard enough and magic will happen. Your true self will emerge. But it also claims that to make that magic a reality, I need to see myself through your eyes.

Thanks to the internet, we can all play at creating ourselves by believing hard enough. Online, no one can tell whether I’m really who I claim to be. Divorced from our bodies and the semi-random nature of who we know in real life, we are all free to find ‘our people’ and express whatever we feel our inner selves to be. If a ‘true self’ or group of ‘true friends’ starts to chafe, we can find another.

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Offline, though, it doesn’t really work like that. Having created Sebastian, I found it easy to get people who didn’t know me well to use that name, but longstanding friends were a different matter. Put simply, it felt weird. And yet self-created identities feel unreal until they’re affirmed by other people, meaning Sebastian only ever was real inasmuch as people actually used the name. Even if my reluctance to demand validation from my parents is proof that I wasn’t truly serious about my new identity, it also pointed to a deeper truth: there’s no such thing as an identity created independently of the way others see you.

To reinvent ourselves without regard to our contexts also implies an inhuman degree of mastery over our bodies. The year Ella Enchanted and Facebook both appeared also saw the launch of one of the defining scifi series of the noughties. Battlestar Galactica depicted a fraying remnant of humanity pursued through space by the embodied-but-mechanical, humanoid-but-infinitely-reincarnated flesh/robot hybrid Cylons. In reality, though, it’s the other way round.

I can’t just upload a new face or different secondary sex characteristics when the old set no longer feel quite ‘me’. Just as our inner sense of selfhood is both consolidated but also constrained by the willingness of loved ones to recognise it, so our ability to apply the digital style of selfhood in ‘meatspace’ is limited by the stubborn refusal of our bodies to behave like a slate we can wipe clean and over-write at will with new selves.

I may have dreamed, as Sebastian, of being able to reincarnate as a new, unblemished me when the old one didn’t suit. But as has become apparent with age, I will always be pursued by the fraying, beleaguered traces of old selves: childhood scars, stretch marks, a C-section scar, the piercings I no longer wear.

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Keira Bell, raised in the social-media paradigm of the authentic-but-infinitely-reinvented self, was on puberty blockers at 15 and cross-sex hormones at 18. By 20 she’d undergone a double mastectomy in search of her authentic self. And having discovered that this ‘authentic self’ did not bring the promised peace, she must now live with the bitter truth that the medical changes she underwent in search of authenticity can’t be erased by uploading a new profile picture. Her willingness to tell the brutal story of how she was misled shows enormous courage.

But in turn the traces and scars offer a clue to a more grounded and human understanding of self than the digital one. The scars, wrinkles and other traces now building up on my gradually ageing physiology are ‘me’ in a sense that’s far more profound than Sebastian ever was. And seen thus, ‘who you truly are’ isn’t something that comes from within, to be greeted with awed affirmation by a hushed and waiting world. Rather, it’s something that emerges, over time, in conversation with that world.

But the disembodied online world in which so many of us now consolidate our selves continues to repeat the lie that our selves are plastic, infinitely renewable, atomised and under our exclusive control as individuals. This untruth betrayed Keira Bell. It hacks at the foundations of what makes us human: our relationships, and our embodied limits. We should resist its further progress through our laws and institutions.

After being prescribed puberty blockers at 16, and undergoing a double mastectomy when she was 20, last year Bell decided to detransition, at 23. She is now taking action against the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, which operates gender identity clinics in Britain, to stop them from ‘rushing’ other teenagers down the same path.

“There was no exploration of the feelings that I had, no psychiatric assessment,” Bell told This Morning. “It was very brief and based on my recent past. There was no in-depth discussion.”

As a result of her decision to transition, Bell will probably never be able to reproduce, nor will her body or voice recover completely from the impacts of testosterone and surgery. Many other girls are having similar changes of mind; more and more are coming forward to say they were sent down the path to transitioning with little information or warning of the long-term implications.

The trouble is, therapists and medical practitioners are reluctant to interrogate these kids and their wishes too deeply, increasingly fearful of being labelled bigoted or transphobic, or even accused of practising “conversion therapy”.

This particular development is currently playing out in Canada. In 2015, Dr Kenneth Zucker was fired from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) in Toronto, which he had run for more than 30 years, after trans activists called his approach “conversion therapy”. It transpired that this actually meant “watchful waiting” — rather than immediately starting patients who think they have gender dysphoria on the transition process, he thought it better to first try to “help children feel comfortable in their own bodies.” If the dysphoria persisted, Zucker would support them in their path to transitioning.

Today, his approach is close to being criminalised.

Last month, David Lametti, the current Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, reintroduced proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, which would criminalise “conversation therapy”. In principle, most can understand the practice of attempting to turn gay people straight as damaging. But Bill C-6 is dangerously deceptive, in that it conflates this outdated intervention with the practice of affirming “gender identity”.

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Lametti told the Canadian House of Commons that “conversion therapy refers to misguided efforts to change the sexual orientation of bisexual, gay, and lesbian individuals to heterosexual [or to] change a person’s gender identity to cisgender”. But while conversion therapy, as it is understood conventionally, is a harmful practice, it shouldn’t be used to describe interventions involving children who believe they suffer from gender dysphoria. Indeed, it is the trend of transitioning children that is more likely to cause harm.

It is common practice to talk about depression, mental health and suicide when discussing the supposed need to “affirm” gender identity in kids, in order to start them on the path to transition. Lametti told the House of Commons of Canada that “scientific evidence” shows people who undergo conversion therapy “must deal with its negative effects such as anxiety, self-hate, depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide”. He fails to mention that while this may be true of gay and lesbian individuals subjected to this practice, there is no evidence to support this claim with regard to youth who are not “affirmed” in their supposed gender identity.

Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst in the US, explained in Quillette that the young female detransitioners she sees in her practice were all “suffering from complex social and mental health issues” at the time they decided to transition, and that “transition often not only failed to address these issues, but at times exacerbated them or added new issues”. Girls struggling with puberty, mental health issues, sexual identity, bullying, trauma, eating disorders, or gender roles will not be helped by testosterone and surgery. The real risk is that, with no caution, these practices will ruin their lives.

Over 90% of children who start on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones, eventually getting surgeries like mastectomies. But the blockers themselves can also have significant side effects, as Bell’s lawyer argued in court, including loss of fertility and sexual function, as well as decreased bone density. The impact on brain development is not yet fully known, but we do know that the surge of sex hormones at puberty triggers important changes in the adolescent brain, connected to cognitive development. Puberty is not only about developing breasts or body hair, it is a necessary part of developing into a healthy adult in many other ways.

Treatments for so-called “trans kids” remains experimental, yet few in Canada are asking why we are experimenting on kids. The number of referrals to the gender clinic at British Columbia’s Children’s Hospital rose from seven in 2007 to 80 in 2017. The trans clinic at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children sees over 200 referrals each year. Ten years ago, the CHEO, a children’s hospital in Ottawa, saw one or two patients a year with concerns about “gender identity”. In 2018, 189 patients were referred to the clinic. And while a decade ago an equal number of boys and girls were coming to the CHEO clinic, today, 75% of patients are female.

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Conflating sexual orientation and gender identity has proven to be a very successful means of manipulating public opinion, and those who wish to support gay and lesbian individuals to live joyful lives have come to believe that supporting gender identity ideology is the same thing. It is not.

Many governments and institutions across many countries are now treating “gender identity” as the determiner of biological sex — that is to say, that if one feels more connected to feminine stereotypes, one must be female, even if one is actually male. As a result, questioning gender norms, feeling uncomfortable in one’s body, experiencing same-sex attraction, or preferring toys or clothing typically associated with the opposite sex, is no longer just a normal part of growing up, but a that sign a child may be “trans”.

Bill C-6 proposes to criminalise those who profit from or advertise “conversion therapy”, which would include therapists and medical practitioners who do not practice the “affirmative model” — which means confirming “trans identity” unquestioningly. Choosing not to encourage a child to transition; suggesting a teen wait, and see if the “gender dysphoria” sticks a few years before beginning the process of transitioning; and challenging the concept of “gender identity” itself would potentially set a therapist or medical practitioner up for criminal sanctions.

It is already difficult to question the legitimacy of gender identity ideology in this climate, and it is practically impossible to access therapy that might allow a teen to grow out of their desire to transition, as so many do. Bill C-6 will make it illegal to offer therapy that does not approach transition as the best path.

The conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity in Bill C-6 is no accident. Lametti argued that his bill is an extension of Bill C-16, which added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code in 2017. Passed with little debate, Bill C-16 set a precedent, leading provinces across Canada to adopt policies allowing males to access women’s same sex spaces. Along with some other feminists, I argued that such legislation would endanger women and girls and reinforce sexist gender roles fought against for decades. We weren’t listened to. But it is, indeed, what came to pass; males have been allowed access to women’s prisons and refuges — and even female beauty therapists are bullied into handling male genitalia.

The ball is already rolling with Bill C-6. Schools in British Columbia and Alberta have adopted SOGI, a programme to direct instructors on how to teach children about gender identity ideology. It claims to be aimed at stopping discrimination against and bullying of LGBTQ kids, but it does much more than that. SOGI insists that “Everyone has a sexual orientation and gender identity” and directs instructors to teach primary school kids that, “When babies are born, doctors and parents usually decide if the baby is a boy or girl. However, not everybody will grow up feeling like or identifying as a boy or a girl.” Students are to “look for clues” that tell them if a boy is really a girl. Lesson plans for teachers direct them to “ask students, what does it mean to feel like a boy or to feel like a girl?”

It is one thing to attempt to stop bullying and depression and suicide in teenagers who feel different and out of place. But it is quite another to indoctrinate children into gender identity ideology.

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Teaching girls and boys that sexist stereotypes determine their sex, and saying that if a young boy prefers dresses or dolls that means he is a girl, is dangerous. Teaching girls that if they don’t conform to old-fashioned notions of femininity they are not girls, but boys, is harmful.

Kids should be free and encouraged to explore a variety of interests, sure. And they should not be shoved into categories if they don’t conform. But they should not be led, by adults, down a path to harmful prescriptions and surgeries without any room for debate — in a country where such debate is about to be criminalised.

While Canada appears to be eager to be first to adopt gender identity policies and legislation, it is not the only country enmeshed in this trend. When 28-year-old Charlie Evans, from the north-east of England, announced that she was setting up a setting up a charity called The Detransition Advocacy Network, hundreds of girls and young women contacted her with their concerns about having transitioned. In the UK, the number of adolescents referred for “gender treatment” has increased from 97 in 2009 to 2,510 in 2017-2018, and among girls from 40 to 1,800 — a 4,400% increase in 10 years.In the United States, surgeries for females transitioning to “male” increased by 289% between 2016 and 2017.

In 2017, our Canadian political representatives ignored the few women who dared speak up about their concerns about Bill C-16. Now we’re facing yet another dangerous bill that will prevent therapists from doing ethical work, and set institutions and practitioners up for very serious legal cases like the one brought forward by Keira Bell. It will restrict freedom of speech and honest debate, and more importantly it will destroy the lives of thousands of kids. I hope all politicians will listen, before it’s too late.

Meghan Murphy is a writer in Vancouver BC and the host of The Same Drugs.