Smith is in no doubt about the damage she believes is being done within — and by — her profession. Psychology should be a lifeline for youngsters struggling with their mental health. Yet according to a small but growing number of clinicians, their ability to help is being undermined when it comes to those experiencing gender dysphoria.

At the center of their concerns is the rise of so-called “affirmative care”: an approach which treats a young person’s declared gender identity as something to be validated rather than explored. Complicating the matter yet further is the Conversion Practices Bill, which will criminalize any attempt to instigate conversations around sexual orientation and gender. In other words, it will criminalize those psychologists who attempt to prompt deeper thinking in minors who are gender confused.

I spoke to dozens of psychologists for this investigation, all of whom expressed fears about the professional consequences of speaking openly. The institutions that should be defending them have instead helped create a climate in which voicing skepticism can carry serious consequences — both for clinicians themselves and for the vulnerable young people in their care.

***

Michael Kerr, 34, describes himself as “a walking example of what’s wrong with trans ideology and affirmative healthcare”. When he was 18, and not long out as a gender non-conforming gay man, Kerr was raped in a nightclub. Traumatized by the experience he used drugs and alcohol to cope, wanting to dissociate from his body. He fell in with a queer crowd in the gay scene, who tried to persuade him that he was really transgender, and should live as a woman. His GP referred him to the Sandyford gender clinic (known as the “Scottish Tavistock”) in 2018, and his first appointment was in 2020.

He was, he says, affirmed by every medical professional he met. “From GPs, to receptionists, the gender clinic — [they] all instantly started referencing me as a woman. It was almost intoxicating to be recognized like that.” After a couple of sessions, he was told he could go straight onto a course of hormones even though he was also struggling with depression and self-doubt. No questions were asked, except which pharmacy he wanted estrogen to be dispatched to.

From then on, Kerr says he was led down a path to full transition. “I now know that my problems came about because I had been raped and had no support to deal with it,” he tells me, “but I was just sent on a single path towards transition, and ended up living as a woman for seven years before realizing it was a huge mistake, and starting on the path to detransition.”

Kerr, who set up Detransition Pathway UK this year, has suffered numerous health conditions since stopping estrogen and starting testosterone. He is almost always in chronic pain, and has gynecomastia — excess breast tissue. But, he says, there are no agreed protocols to support people like him.

Neither his GP nor anyone at Sandyford suggested Kerr might try generic mental-health support. “Any decent clinical psychologist should be able to recognize that so many of the young people presenting with gender identity issues have got underlying trauma under conditions,” he argues. “I am a living, breathing example of how not to deal with someone in mental distress.”

Transactivists have long argued that the number of those who regret transitioning, or revert back to their actual sex, is small, tending to estimate the figure at perhaps 0.1%. Kerr believes the figure is far higher, and suggests this is the fault of medical professionals looking after them. Even when he voiced doubts about his gender treatment, he says, the clinic told him to “keep going”.

Hilary Cass foresaw the problem back in 2024 when she published her review of gender identity services for children and young people. Back then, she addressed the fact that some practitioners had become reluctant to provide psychological support because they feared being accused of “failing to affirm a young person’s gender identity or of practising conversion therapy”. Cass was anxious that any future legislation “should not make workforce problems worse than they are”.

The British Psychological Society (BPS) does have a Code of Ethics and Conduct (2021). This outlines four key principles to adopt when working with patients: dignity, privacy, consent and self-determination “of all persons”; working only within one’s trained expertise; avoiding harm and safeguarding welfare; and honesty and transparency.

These principles are particularly vital when working with children and young people, for obvious reasons. The trouble is, the body that is supposed to be advocating for children and professionals is failing to properly care for either.

Two years on from Cass’s review, the psychologists I spoke to attest that, if anything, things have got worse. Underlying complex presentations remain unexplored and insufficient time is given to evaluate psychological needs. As the conversion practices bill strides ever closer to legislation, fear within the profession is growing — yet hardly anyone dares to speak out. Of that small but significant minority of child clinical psychologists who have questioned the affirmative approach of “gender medicine” — all have been roundly punished. Some have lost their income, been labeled transphobic, or worse, held responsible for the deaths of “trans kids”.

“I’m seeing kids now who really need a psychologist who isn’t going to instantly affirm them and send them down the ‘gender’ route,” says Nancy Reed*. Clinicians are afraid to speak out, says the clinical psychologist based in London. “If they heard bad things about me [professionally] and their parents took them away from my care, they would be instantly affirmed by someone else, and that would be the end of that.”

The current model for gender treatment resembles what clinical psychologist Leslie Jones* describes as a “trans conveyor belt”: the affirmation approach leads to social transition, which in turn leads to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and seriously risky life-long medical trajectories. We already know this. But what’s surprising is that the direction of travel isn’t changing. Jones was “horrified” by the “ideological stance” that had gripped the private gender clinic he worked in. Gender became the sole focus, with all of the problems which may have been behind the gender distress unexplored and left to fester. And as another clinician confirmed, we have “gone miles from evidence-based psychological thinking. It’s infiltrated everyone as well as the systems, the people, society.”

***

Consultant psychiatrist Az Hakeem believes the ideological capture of the mental health establishment first took hold two decades ago. When he began practicing in 2000, Hakeem specialized in using psychotherapy to treat adult gender dysphoria. He trained in forensic psychotherapy at the Portman Clinic. This went on to become part of the Tavistock, where the now-disgraced and closed Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic, itself entirely focused on clinical psychology, was located. For Hakeem, who worked at the Tavistock until 2012, psychology was a crucial part of the diagnosis and treatment. He has always seen gender dysphoria as a “symptom” of broader mental-health problems, not simply a medical one. There is a significant distinction, as he saw it, between the work the psychologists were doing, and the work the physicians carried out. “The surgeons [carrying out sex reassignment procedures] were like master craftsmen,” he tells me. “They didn’t know what was happening in the mind of the patients; the psychiatrists simply referred them for surgery.”

In the early days at the Tavistock, he says he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “It was just horrific what I was seeing. All I could see were children who’d just be gay. They were like camp boys and tomboy girls. And I remember saying to the person who ran it, ‘Isn’t what you’re doing mad?’”

Hakeem was an early heretic, one of eight clinicians working at Tavistock to sign a 2002 letter published in the Telegraph which criticized a European Court ruling allowing a trans-identified male to marry his same-sex partner. The signatories described it as “a victory of fantasy over reality”. He knew, unlike many outsiders, exactly what was going on because he had worked closely with both pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals. “They gave me a very good insight into how transitioning unhappy people with psychological problems is not the answer,” he told me. “In fact, their problems are almost always exacerbated. Some of the post-operative group members warned those that hadn’t yet had surgery to avoid it at all costs.”

In any other context, he says, the medical professional would explore a patient’s beliefs and motivations, in order to understand what else might be going on. And yet, right from the start, this was not the approach taken by mental health professionals with gender confused patients.

As far back as the early 2000s, in other words, concern was being expressed, and indeed allowed to be expressed, about the fact that little, if any, treatment other than cross-sex hormones and surgery was available to gender-distressed patients. But if Hakeem was able to be relatively open about his views, the professional culture soon started to change.

***

Sam Wood*, a clinical psychologist for some decades, says the rise of transactivism “really hit hard a decade or so ago”. Such is the degree of its current entrenchment that the vast majority of clinical psychologists will avoid expressing any disagreement in public. Indeed, many are choosing not to work with gender distressed children because of the requirement to either affirm them or be accused of practicing conversion therapy. “You’re going to get attacked by transactivists, including colleagues,” she tells me. “They can wreck you.”

Many clinical psychologists warn of this “chilling effect” when discussing the draft conversion practices bill, currently at the pre-legislative scrutiny stage. The Government claims the legislation is designed to criminalize abuse, as opposed to punishing parents or psychologists who resist the push to affirm. The problem is that what Cass suggested in her review two years ago is already coming to pass. Clinicians fear they will be accused of conducting conversion therapy if they take an exploratory approach with the patient — essentially, doing what they were trained to do. And so, instead of questioning the kids, they are urged to enable them. Psychology, it seems, has forgotten what it is for.

As Anna Hutchinson, a clinical psychologist with significant experience in child and adolescent mental health says: “Psychology is not just a profession that provides support and reassurance. It is supposed to be a scientific and clinical discipline, which requires us to question assumptions, scrutinize evidence and consider different explanations in all kinds of ways for all sorts of things. Gender shouldn’t be made an exception. If we lose the freedom to do all of this, we lose something really fundamental.”

Tony Lane*, who trained as a clinical psychologist in 2020, makes a similar point. “One of the first things I was told was: ‘If you have a butch-presenting girl, or a feminine boy… you’re going to have to affirm them as trans, unless their parents are hostile to the idea, and then you’d probably be sacked for conversion therapy’.”

He added: “I thought they were exaggerating, but it turned out they weren’t.” More worrying still, Lane says he was constantly told that being transgender was not a mental health problem despite the repeated insistence that if these children were not seen and affirmed urgently, they might end up suicidal. “Surely that is a clear sign of extremely precarious mental fragility?” he asks. “I felt like we were being told: ‘agree with everything your patient says, do not scrutinize, meet their demands or they might die, and then you’ll have blood on your own hands’.”

It hardly helps, Sam Wood* says, that there “isn’t much of a backbone in the profession”. She tells me that as a result of this lack of resolve, “trans activists can easily steamroll, and just take over, delivering the training courses on gender, and writing the rules pretty much”.

The backbone should be provided by their representative body, the BPS, which is supposed to advise and advocate for its members. But instead, supported by charities and lobbyists such as Gender Plus, Gendered Intelligence, and Pink Therapy, it is delivering courses which pretty much uniformly encourage the affirmation approach. As one old hand who attended such a course complained: “It was hard-line DEI, with constant talk of how race, class, disability, and all the other currently popular oppressions overlap with gender identity.”

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That politicization is now standard, with the BPS silencing any skepticism and pushback. “Their view is, anyone who hasn’t worked with gender is ‘not an expert’,” one former GIDS employee told me. “This mystical ‘expertise’ simply means being willing to affirm anyone and everyone who says they are the opposite sex.”

“If you want an easy life as a psychologist affirming people, [it’s] a dream!” says Lianne Smith* who isn’t smiling. She is deeply frustrated by what has happened to her once meaningful clinical practice. “It takes a high cognitive load to sit with someone for 50 minutes trying to attune to their words, body language, [and] subconscious. Then there are the deeply traumatic stories of rape, childhood abuse, and loss. Gender affirming care takes away all the negativity and just leaves clinician and patient feeling happy and productive.”

What particularly upsets her is, somewhat ironically given the avowed commitment to diversity, is the one-size-fits-all approach. “The kids I work with, they are so varied,” says Smith. “The fact they’ve got the same diagnosis is utterly ridiculous.”

“There’s a lot of victimhood about,” another whistleblower tells me. “There are individual [practitioners] using the fact that they are LGBTQ+, or autistic, or black as a qualification, as opposed to their skills as an actual clinical psychologist.” Indeed, she goes as far as to say that within the profession there are those “who are not cut out to be psychologists” — they simply want to “‘be kind”’.

If the affirmative model dictates that gender dysphoria is not a disorder — and the only “treatment” which can be offered is to kindly say “yes” to any request from the patient, fearing that to do otherwise would be an inducement to suicide — then the inevitable result is medicalization. As Smith explains: “All identity is socially constructed, trans is no different. And in the case of ‘trans’, the identity has been constructed by and with medics and psychologists. No other identity needs medical affirmation to be legitimate, but this one does. It wouldn’t exist — in its current form at least — without medical and psychological compliance.”

There are some who dare speak out. But the consequences can be grim. Anne Woodhouse is an independent consultant clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience. She nearly lost her job when, in 2022, she was reported to the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) for posting and interacting with Twitter posts critical of transgender orthodoxy. Only after three years of investigation was she cleared when no compelling evidence was found that she was unfit to practice. Regardless of the outcome, though, “the process has been the punishment,” she says. “Those three years were so stressful, and to have this serious threat to my professional integrity and career, pretty hellish.”

“I had completely missed how all the organisations had been captured,” she continues. Her case perfectly illustrates the stakes of professional disagreement. Any questioning of the orthodoxy could lead to complaints not just from within the professional body, but also from the general public. In fact, Woodhouse was referred to the HCPC by the deputy head of her child’s school — a part-time drag artist.

I did find another psychologist to push back on the record. But Sandra Pertot is retired and in Australia, whose psychological society likewise refuses to support any form of mental health practice that does not “affirm” children who say they are transgender.

Pertot specialized in sex therapy before retiring as a clinical psychologist four years ago. “In the Seventies and Eighties, I saw a lot of young kids who were confused about their sexuality. I used what has become called ‘watchful waiting’ with them and didn’t tell them whether they were gay or not gay.”

In 2006, Pertot moved to a small town and “naively” began airing her concerns about the rise in children presenting with rapid-onset gender dysphoria at her practice. “I knew nothing about this transgender drama that was going on in the rest of the world,” she says. “And I saw these young kids come in saying they were trans and I didn’t think anything of it. I just did some work, watchful waiting and the interesting thing was none of them suicided, none of them threw hissy fits.”

Then, around 2019, Pertot saw two girls who both independently determined they were male. Unconvinced they met the criteria of persistent gender dysphoria, she sought the opinion of a psychiatrist who specialized in gender. She was told: “Sandra, If they’re saying they’re trans, they are trans.”

“Both of them ended up going on hormone therapy, but it really bothered me,” Pertot continues. “So I started to question this, and this is where I got into trouble.” Like Woodhouse on the other side of the world, she received a complaint against her, and was told she was “the most hated woman in the Sydney queer community”. She’s only speaking out now because she’s retired. As she told me: “They can’t do anything to me now!”

***

So who protects the psychologists? The BPS, which represents 50,000 practitioners and shapes standards and the public debate, is the profession’s representative body. It should advocate for the integrity of the profession. But every single person I spoke to for this investigation holds that the BPS is, at least in part, responsible for the current climate of fear. It has failed to reassure practitioners that legitimate clinical disagreement will be protected. Indeed, it has shut down attempts by those within psychology to stand up to activism — and it has failed to stop activists from embedding themselves within the profession.

Pat Harvey, a retired BPS office holder, is among the Society’s most outspoken critics. She helped set up BPS Watch with other retired clinical psychologists concerned about the organization’s direction. For her, the problem is not merely the BPS’s public position on gender, but how it has responded when members have challenged it. Its position is represented by the in-house magazine, The Psychologist. Harvey has made several official complaints about Jon Sutton, its long-standing editor, accusing him of personal bias and failing to foster balanced debate around gender ideology. Instead, she claims the publication has “regularly promoted the views of proponents of transgender ideology… actively suppressing those of gender critical or sex realist psychologists”. She also claims that the BPS’s gender guidelines were resolutely “affirmative” and minimized the importance of co-morbid mental health concerns. Sutton, meanwhile, bats the complaints upstairs, confident that he will be supported.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the magazine’s promotion of the online clinic GenderGP. Run by Helen Webberley along with her husband Mike Webberley, the controversial service regularly prescribed puberty blockers to children with only minimal consultation. Helen was suspended for two months by a tribunal after putting three patients at “unwarranted risk of harm”, and Michael was struck off by the General Medical Council following a “catalogue of failings” and serious misconduct. When Harvey contacted Richard Stephens, at the time chair of the BPS’s editorial board, and now chair of its research strategy board, to complain about The Psychologist promoting GenderGP, he told her that the magazine’s advisory committee did “not propose to advise amending the article”.

“[Stephens] wrote that the day after the final Cass report was published,” Harvey says. “Doctors had been told that they should not prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones on the advice of GenderGP as it does ‘not provide physiological or psychological support to patients’. This clearly indicated that they should amend the entry or remove it.” Eventually, they took it down.

Others have submitted similar complaints about being silenced and curtailed from doing their jobs effectively to no avail. One said that he was called a bigot for questioning the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative and told he shouldn’t be practicing as a psychologist.

Sutton, says Leslie Jones*, is “ideologically signed up” to trans ideology. “He said explicitly to me and several other people that he’s not actually going to produce any questioning or critical content relating to trans stuff, it’s all going to be affirmative because ‘trans people are the most marginalized and oppressed’.”

For Harvey, all this runs counter to the very purpose of psychology. “Psychology is supposed to be there to help people navigate their way through difficulties in their mental health, and understand how they became unwell,” she insists. It does not exist, “to validate social justice causes.” However, this is what happened to the BPS. And without the supportive oversight of the body purporting to protect its members, any psychologist exercising critical thoughts — essentially practicing according to their training — is left at the mercy of activists.

Trans rights activists these days wield a lot of power when making complaints about “transphobic” clinicians. The Trans Safety Network (TSN), formed in 2020, extensively scrutinizes the work of healthcare professionals, in particular clinical psychologists and those working in gender-identity services. Its stated mission is that it will “record evidence to understand the timelines and escalation of organized harm against trans people in the UK.” It looks into institutions to ascertain whether or not they are “transphobic”, and reports on alleged misdemeanors. “Trans people are not required to transition in particular ways, experience particular feelings, or obtain medical approval in order to be considered trans,” reads its values section.

In 2021, TSN was successful in its efforts to cancel a conference for trainee psychiatrists, hosted by Great Ormond Street Hospital, claiming that attendees would feel “unsafe” because two “trans skeptical” speakers would be attending. “There is no possible way in which this event can be a ‘safe environment’ for LGBTQ+ and especially trans participants,” they wrote. Health Education England agreed to cancel the event.

The TSN has also devoted considerable time and resources trying to discredit the Cass Report. It has opposed Wes Streeting’s decision to ban puberty blockers; and it has poured scorn on the NHS for failing to immediately validate “trans children” and offer instant access to “gender affirming” drugs. The TSN also takes aim at the Royal College of Psychiatry, criticizing anyone who suggests that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones may not be good for children.

For his part, TSN’s director, Mallory Moore, has invested a great deal of time harassing clinical psychologists, and making numerous complaints to regulators and management. In an article published in 2023, Moore wrote: “I’ve been reporting conversion therapists to professional medical and therapeutic bodies in the UK for over two years, facilitating survivors to make complaints”.

It’s worth remembering, here, what Hilary Cass said about clinicians worried about the affirmative approach: “The majority of [their] patient presentations were extremely complex, with a mix of trauma, abuse, mental health diagnoses, past forensic history, ASD and ADHD, and therefore this limited assessment was inadequate. These other clinical issues were not addressed or considered in decisions to prescribe masculinizing or feminizing hormones.”

***

Audrey Taylor* has worked with gender-distressed children and young people for her whole career. “I became known as the one that parents struggling to talk to their kids about sexual identity, or the difficulties they were having approaching puberty, would come to, because they trusted me. I’m a bit gender-unconforming myself, and I know how both boys and girls internalize punishing rules about how they should behave.”

Initially, Taylor, who qualified in clinical psychology in the early Nineties, suggests that the kids who came to her would more often than not turn out to be lesbian and gay — or simply not fit the traditional mold of boys and girls. But, as she tells it: “Things got much more confusing once we got into the 2010s and beyond. Kids started telling their parents what to think, and the tables were turned.”

“Parents were being dictated to by their children who told them that they had no idea what it was like to be trans,” Taylor continues, “and that they knew exactly what the issues were, and that they didn’t need a psychologist to work it out for them. They diagnosed themselves.” She adds: “And the parents, this later cohort, appeared to be frightened of their own children.”

Taylor recalls that parents would initially make contact and tell her that their child was suffering from gender dysmorphia, or simply that they were transgender. “I’d never had patients or their parents self-diagnosing. I wasn’t sure what my role was anymore. I would try to scrutinize what the issues were, but I was usually shut down as soon as I started exploring other issues, such as trauma, potential neurodiversity, or some kind of mental health condition.”

Indeed, it’s hard for parents to know how to manage gender confused children, who may get kudos from their peers for identifying as trans, and validation from schools and social services. Given the ever-lengthening waiting lists for psychological help from the NHS, and the explosion in anxiety and autism among children, many desperate parents will seek help elsewhere — and private psychologists are happy to help. “If they are going through difficult times, for all kinds of reasons, they’ll just put all their eggs in one basket and say: ‘We’ve got a gender incongruent child’.” Private clinics will then give them instant validation. “Then the problems really begin.”

By this she means medication. Despite the warnings in the Cass Report about the weak evidence base for prescribing puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, this is an increasing problem. Not counting those who are in private treatment, today, more than 250 primary age children, some as young as four, are in line for “gender care” treatment at NHS clinics. What this care actually consists of is unclear. Although the use of puberty blockers has been banned, Cass has thrown a crumb to the activists, who may be able to access medication via clinical trials; Cass believes that otherwise, children will procure drugs from “unregulated and dangerous routes”.

In the meantime, with the explosion in mental health problems among the young, NHS waiting lists are growing ever longer, and private providers are thriving. In 2024, a private clinic called Gender Plus Hormones, for “gender questioning” young people, became the first service of its kind in the UK to receive approval from the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Part of the provider Gender Plus, it offers hormone treatment to those over the age of 16 following psychological assessment “by a team of clinical psychologists across a minimum of six sessions”. Its CEO is Aidan Kelly, who in 2024 wrote in the Guardian that clinicians should be the only ones deciding whether or not to ban puberty blockers, not politicians. He points out that puberty blockers can be helpful for a “carefully selected minority of transgender youth who have a clear and consistent understanding of their gender identity”. The trouble is, if these children have been affirmed in that identity without challenge from a young age, as seems to be the case within the profession now, how are they to know that this is truly what they want?

Currently, Gender Plus Hormones is unable to prescribe puberty blockers, but they have commissioned what they’re calling “an independent review” to assess the evidence behind the decision to ban them for children. Dr Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz has been commissioned to write it: he has referred to the Cass ban as a “moral panic”.

So while a few clinical psychologists are battling to discuss whether their young patients have underlying trauma, others are applying to gender dysphoria the same logic that they might apply to preventative dental work, i.e., the earlier we get in there, the better.

This tortured debate over puberty blockers raises a serious question for psychologists: how are the effects of transition actually measured in the young? And this is something David Freedman, a retired social science researcher, has studied in depth. In 1998, he co-edited a book by the founder and former director of Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), Domenico DiCegli, called Stranger in My Own Body: Atypical Gender Identity Development and Mental Health. “At that time,” Freedman tells me, “there were relatively tiny numbers of people who claimed to be trapped in the wrong body.”

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Some years later, as he saw growing disquiet within the profession with regard to children presenting with gender distress, Freedman came out of retirement to examine an early intervention study by GIDS and University College Hospital. The study involved 44 children aged between 12 and 15 recruited over three years. It concluded that the puberty blockers brought “no changes in psychological function”.

The methodology included information compiled from questionnaires from both parents and children about feelings, relationships and depression. Yet when Freedman, along with Professor Susan McPherson of the University of Essex, re-analyzed the data, they found a huge range in the outcomes in terms of mental health. While just 29% had improved, 37% showed no change, and 34% had deteriorated. Their 2024 paper on the topic caused consternation among transactivists who had previously argued that puberty blockers do not cause harm.

“I felt children were actually being abused,” says Freedman, “and that they were being entrusted to a service that was not offering the best possible treatment to them.”

“Puberty is crucial,” he continues, “children build bone mass and [the drugs] suppress growth spurt and skeletal strength. We don’t know yet exactly what effect it has on the brain, but we know it can and does affect functioning. This is unforgivable abuse.”

Nonetheless, following the closure of the GIDS and a growing call for the puberty blocker trial to be canceled, Cass told the British Medical Journal that she still considered it justified. “Her own review found that the evidence for puberty blockers is extremely weak, that there is no demonstrated benefit, and states that the longer-term risks are unknown,” says Lianne Smith. “And now Cass is a staunch defender of conducting a trial involving 250 child guinea pigs…”

***

Could there be another motivation behind the push for blockers? Joanne Hall*, who worked with young adults in a gender service, believes there might be. She says she discovered the limits of her freedom when she began questioning whether patients’ wider psychological needs were being adequately addressed. “Of the patients that come to the clinic, there is high rates of autism, of complex trauma, of abuse. Those things are clearly relevant, but I was called transphobic for saying it.” Hall says she took her concerns to senior managers, but was eventually pushed out of her role. She recalls confronting one manager: “I said, “We’re castrating people as a treatment option when this is about trauma and autism.” He said, “I agree with everything you’re saying. The thing you don’t understand is that the gender service bankrolls the mental health service in this city.””

Her account raises a question that is arguably bigger than the dispute over gender medicine per se: what happens when someone’s clinical judgment comes into conflict with the priorities of the institution employing them?

***

Today, Parliament will hear the first oral evidence on the Conversion Practices Bill. Which way will it go? And will the outcome be indicative of whether this bitter battle is lost or, finally, won? It is worth remembering Cass’s emphasis, in her review, that young people experiencing gender distress should receive comprehensive, evidence-based mental-health support, just like any other child with similar psychological or neuro-developmental needs. But that would require psychologists to be brave and robust enough to stand up and say that their profession doesn’t advocate for this approach any more. It would also require their regulatory body to support them.

Will the BPS do that? The jury is out. I contacted them, offering a right of reply regarding the numerous complaints made by members and former members. And I also asked what they had to say about Sallie Baxendale’s shortlisting for the Maddox Prize, following her research into the effects of puberty blockers on brain development. The prestigious prize is awarded to scientists “whose courage and persistence in promoting or defending evidence despite facing obstacles have had significant real-world impact”. And, as Baxendale pointed out: “It is a sign that something has gone very wrong when ordinary clinical enquiry and following the evidence needs to be recognised as an act of courage.”

“The BPS should have been the strongest advocate of the concerned clinicians at the Tavistock,” she says, “and should now be celebrating them as examples of the very best of us.” But while the BPS declined to respond, there is a glimmer of hope. A number of psychologists have gravitated over to the Association of Clinical Psychologists (ACP-UK), which does take a firm stand against the instant affirmation model.

What will this rupture do to the practice and integrity of clinical psychology? Today’s parliamentary hearing will give an early indication of how this battle might play out. But amid all the furor, a more important point risks being forgotten. Those who have the most to lose from this struggle aren’t the psychologists or the credibility of their discipline; the greatest price will be paid by the vulnerable people it exists to help.

* Names have been changed. 

The law in question is the “Conversion Practices Draft Bill”, published this week and which ostensibly outlaws attempts to force an individual to change his or her sexual orientation or “gender identity”. The trouble with this framing is that it conflates two entirely antagonistic concepts. As ever with culture war discourse, regressive measures are being smuggled through under the guise of progressive language. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, a ban on “trans conversion therapy” amounts to state-sanctioned gay conversion therapy.

To understand why, it’s worth outlining the difference between what the bill claims to propose and its actual ramifications. Gay rights in this country were secured because of a growing recognition that a minority of any given population are inherently attracted toward their own sex. Gender identity ideology posits that biological sex is irrelevant to sexual orientation, and that a sexed essence — or “soul”, as gender activist Helen Webberley puts it — should be the determining factor.

The key problem here is that there is no evidence for this pseudoscientific belief and, thanks to the current genderist orthodoxy, same-sex orientation has routinely been misinterpreted as a mismatch between soul and body. In other words, “gender-affirming care” is often a fig leaf for an attempt to “fix” gay and bisexual people who fail to align with heterosexual frameworks and traditional sex stereotypes. Under the new law, anyone who does not automatically affirm someone’s belief that they are “born in the wrong body”, or who questions the notion of “transgender identity”, could be accused of “conversion practice” and sentenced to up to five years in jail.

The statistical evidence of the risk to gay people is clear. Data published by the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) — the NHS pediatric clinic that was shut down in March 2024 after it was determined by the Cass Review to be providing treatment that was unsafe and unevidenced — showed that an overwhelming majority of its adolescent patients were either gay or bisexual. In 2012, this amounted to around 90% of females and more than 80% of males. By 2015, the proportions had declined but remained a majority, with 70% of females and 60% of males falling within this category.

Homosexuality is not the only factor that can lead to confusion over “gender”. In her book Time to Think, journalist Hannah Barnes outlined in meticulous detail how the vast majority of children referred to GIDS for gender-related distress also presented with a range of other difficulties, including depression, self-harm, anxiety, histories of abuse and dysfunctional families. Roughly a third of patients were suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as compared to only 2% of the country as a whole.

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Yet it is impossible to ignore the disproportionate impact on same-sex attracted individuals. For years now, gay rights groups have been explaining the problem, but have been routinely shut out by ministers. The most recent statement by LGB Alliance puts it plainly: “The old conversion therapy told gay people to change their sexuality. The new version tells them to change their bodies.” The Government’s bill “risks making it harder for those young people to receive the time, conversations and exploratory support that have helped generations of same-sex attracted people understand and accept themselves”.

Labour ministers such as Olivia Bailey are claiming that the bill would only apply to “abusive” conduct, but the draft itself says something very different. It defines “conversion practice” as “conduct carried out by a person towards an individual” with the intention of “causing the individual (i) to have to not to have, (ii) to believe that they have or do not have, a transgender identity or a particular transgender identity”. The language is so broadly drafted as to incorporate those who simply deny the existence of a gendered soul at all.

Moreover, the criterion could be as simple as causing “serious alarm or distress”. As criminal barrister Dennis Kavanagh has pointed out, this “begs the question of where this act leaves writers, commentators, political charities and standard companies. Given the offense can be ‘any conduct’ could that be a book? A passionately written article? Could it be a speech? I think so”.

Though the bill contains an explicit exemption for healthcare professionals, it does not protect parents who wish to reassure their children that they have not been “born in the wrong body” — and, whether they be an effeminate boy or a masculine girl, should learn to be happy as they are. Studies have repeatedly shown that gender nonconformity in youth is one of the most reliable predictors of homosexuality in later life. But if a child claims to be neither male nor female, for a parent to deny this could land them in prison.

Indeed, the very notion of a “nonbinary identity” is seemingly protected by the new bill, even though it does not exist as a category in UK law. It states that the “circumstances in which an individual has a transgender identity” include gender reassignment, transsexuality and if “the individual identifies as neither male nor female or as not solely male or female”. Yet in spite of the common misunderstandings around intersex conditions (congenital differences of sex development that occur in males or females) there is no such thing as a third sex or an absence of sex in human beings. For a parent to point this out to a child who identifies as “nonbinary” but is probably just gay — a reality check that might well cause “alarm or distress” — could now result in a criminal prosecution.

The nebulous nature of the bill means it can also be weaponized against feminists and gender-critical campaigners. As lawyer Sarah Philimore has noted, it is likely that “those claiming a trans identity will assert that even mild mannered online posts which do not 100% ‘affirm’ the reality of a trans identity, will be claimed to cause immediate and very significant harm”. The new law is not only smuggling self-identification onto the statute books, it provides a legal cudgel to beat anyone who rejects the premise.

The bill relies on the rhetorical and incendiary ramifications of the term “conversion therapy”. Most members of the public will assume it refers to the “corrective rape” of lesbians, or else the gay men who were subjected to torture, electric-shock treatment and even castration in an effort to “cure” them of their homosexuality. This is why the bill conflates orientation with identity. It means that sensible forms of therapy for those struggling with their sexuality are elided with the inarguable evil of the gay-conversion practices of the past.

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But these practices are already illegal under existing law. The bill offers no new protections for gay people, but rather puts them at risk of medicalization for their orientation under the guise of “gender-affirming care”. Whereas not a single person was ever prosecuted under Section 28, Labour’s new law might not only see concerned parents in prison, but would also create the conditions by which gay people are subjected to irreversible medical interventions to see them “heterosexualized”. The Iranian government has been promoting “sex changes” as a remedy for homosexuality for years. By insisting that transgender identity ought to be automatically affirmed — an approach that has led to the prescription of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgery for gay people — the UK government is now following suit.

Given that activists have so successfully muddied the waters through the redefinition of language, it is tempting to give Labour the benefit of the doubt. Surely, we might ask, its ministers do not wish to harm gay people and are simply ignorant of the policy they are supporting? Yet the Government’s dogged refusal to listen to campaigners on this issue suggests at the very least a flippancy about the erosion of gay rights if it means that its ideology can be upheld.

Consider the evasive behavior of MP Tris Osborne when challenged by journalist Jo Bartosch. Faced with the accusation that his party’s bill is homophobic, Osborne simply deferred to the judgment of ideologically captured organizations: “The UK’s leading health, counseling and psychotherapy bodies (including the Royal College of GPs, British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists, Royal College of Psychiatrists) have, since 2015, agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) making it clear that conversion therapy in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation is unethical, potentially harmful and is not supported by evidence.”

At no point does Osborne address the fact that not one of these organizations has satisfactorily defined “gender identity”. It could hardly be otherwise, since the concept cannot be defined without resorting to circular appeals to “gender”. What all of these groups have in common is an assumption that “gender identity” exists without explaining what it is or providing evidence for its ontological basis. The Government is now legislating on the basis of what is essentially a faith-based position.

Nor does Osborne address the key point that the legislation he supports is fundamentally anti-gay. Whether its architects are motivated by hatred or disgust for same-sex attracted people is beside the point; the ideology it promotes is in direct opposition to gay rights, irrespective of their intentions. One suspects that ministers are dodging this point because they must know by now that they are putting gay people in jeopardy without any moral or scientific justification. Bev Jackson of LGB Alliance, who has rightly branded this “Labour’s Section 28”, directly asked Osborne the pertinent question: “Can you really not see how profoundly homophobic this is?” Answer came there none.

This refusal to listen to critics seems to be the party line. As MP Olivia Bailey said in a recent interview: “We are going to see through on this ban. We’re going to work at pace through our pre-legislative scrutiny process. It’s really important to get a diversity of views into that legislation, and then we’re going to crack on with legislating for this”. The implication, that scrutiny of the bill is a mere formality, is hardly surprising. The Government is now openly positioning itself as an enemy of its gay citizens, and it is unlikely to be deterred.

As far as I was concerned when I spoke those words, I was offering my own perspective as a woman — but also saying something that every woman on this planet has always known, and that feminists have repeated for decades. We really must be wary of men because the problem of sexual violence is overwhelmingly a male problem. In France, 99% of rapes are committed by men. Women know. 

According to the three LGBTQ+ organizations who brought criminal proceedings against me — Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS, all of which receive funding by French taxpayers, by the way — my words amounted to incitement to transphobic hatred. On Wednesday, the judge delivered his verdict that, yes, I was guilty of committing a “public injury towards a person or a group because of their sex, their sexual orientation or their gender identity”. On top of paying €1,000 to the French state, I’m also liable for various other costs. All told, I’m obliged to pay €4,754. 

Of course, what matters here is not money but principle. Apparently it is now against the law for women to tell other women to be wary of the opposite sex. Naturally, my lawyers and I intend to appeal this Orwellian verdict, all the way to the highest court in France if necessary, since it marks a worrying shift in French freedom of expression — quite beyond the specifics of my own rather absurd trial. It seems to me basically unacceptable that a woman should be condemned for having expressed her misgivings about the safety of women and the reality of biological sex. This represents narrowing of permissible speech in France, the judicialization of ideological disagreement — and the growing influence of gender politics on a country that once prided itself on intellectual honesty. 

I uttered the fateful phrase in October 2023. In my work as a feminist writer and activist, I have long argued that allowing men to change their legal sex and be recognized as women has real implications in various areas, from medicine to law to parenting to sport — and that these merit discussion. I co-founded the feminist NGO Femelliste, and later co-authored a book investigating the excesses and consequences of modern gender ideology. 

When I was invited onto the France 2 show Quelle époque, hosted by the prominent TV journalist Léa Salamé, I hoped it would be a chance to have an open, honest and respectful discussion. I would be appearing alongside France’s first-ever transgender mayor, Marie Cau, then-head of the small northern village of Tilloy-Les-Marchiennes. 

In the event, the debate felt more like an ambush. I was accused of being part of the “far-Right sphere”, which could not be further from the truth. Then the contentious moment arrived when Salamé asked me what I, as a feminist, thought transgender demands might take away from women. I answered that these issues should not simply be opposed — “we must find common ground”. I then raised specific areas where conflicts arise, notably around sport and prison policy. 

In relation to prisons, I referred to documented cases in the United States and the United Kingdom, where male prisoners convicted of violence against women had self-identified as female and been transferred to women’s prisons — where they subsequently sexually assaulted female inmates. It was in this specific context that I said: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but as women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises.” 

Two months later, I received a complaint from Mousse, SOS Homophobie and ADHEOS. The associations cited several of my statements in the program, including one in which I said that, in my view, Marie Cau was a “transfeminine man”.  This was framed as a “transphobic insult”. More broadly, the document portrayed me as someone who contributed to a climate of hostility, even suggesting that my words could be linked to the suffering or suicide of trans-identifying individuals. 

So the initial complaint was not narrowly constructed. It was an attempt, rather, to build a case around a series of statements that, taken together, characterized me not just as someone who had said something controversial: but as someone engaged in a broader pattern of harmful speech. This strategy did not survive legal scrutiny. Before the trial began, my lawyers Richard Malka and Marine Viegas challenged the admissibility and legal qualification of several statements. A significant portion of the complaint was dismissed on procedural and technical grounds; what remained was not the full set of accusations, but that single sentence — “As women, we are obliged to be wary of people with penises”. 

Note that the sentence had become curiously detached from its preceding qualification: “I am not saying that all trans people do this, far from it, but…” Indeed, I was speaking about a concrete category of risk — in other words, doing the opposite of generalizing. This did not prevent the complaint from accusing me of “abusive generalization”. This was the first lesson of the case: once a statement has been ideologically re-coded, context ceases to matter. 

At the hearing, the court returned obsessively to two things: the phrase “people with penises”, and the verb se mefier de — which might be rendered as “to be cautious of”, “to be wary of” or “to watch out for”. The prosecutor argued that my words were doubly discriminatory: first, because they implied that all men are dangerous; and second, because they targeted trans women, recast as “women with penises”, as objects of suspicion. The prosecutor even requested that I be sentenced not only to a fine, but to a so-called “citizenship training course” — a faintly comic euphemism for ideological re-education.

The court’s questioning suggested that my phrase “to be wary of” had to be understood as a hostile generalization. It was treated not as the language of female self-protection, but as a form of exhortation. The word “obliged” made it worse, the prosecutor argued. It transformed caution into an injunction. 

Then there was the phrase “people with penises”. The judge suggested that it sounded like a punchline, a provocation. I explained that I was in fact using a term that is deemed by many progressives to be more inclusive than merely “men” (since as we now know, not all men have penises). Indeed, “people with penises” comes from the same discursive universe as “people with uteruses”, “people who menstruate”, “sex assigned at birth”, and so on. However, it seems that when linguistic logic is applied in the wrong direction, it suddenly becomes indecent. 

The judge then pressed me, several times, on whether I believed all men were dangerous — attempting to force me into either caricature or capitulation. Did I think literally all men were rapists? Really? Every single one? At one point, I was momentarily thrown off balance by this insistence. My lawyer Richard Malka intervened and reframed the point. Not all men are violent, obviously, but the overwhelming majority of rapists are men. That is the social fact women live with, and it is what underlies female caution. It was a necessary intervention as the hearing repeatedly tried to re-code rational female behaviors as forms of ideological extremism. 

But as I learned, this new moral grammar has rendered lived experience all but illegible. Like all women, I have learned from childhood to assess risk. Do not walk alone too late. Watch your drink. Be careful with men you don’t know. Trust your instincts. These are all things we learn as we navigate a social world structured by asymmetrical risk. In court, though, the female habit of caution was recast as criminal suspicion. For this, ordinary reality had to be denied. 

I chose Richard Malka to represent me for a particular reason. His name is not just associated with technical legal expertise — but with some of the most consequential free speech cases of the past two decades. He was the lawyer for newspaper Charlie Hebdo, before and after the terrorist attack on its offices. Malka defended the newspaper’s right to publish caricatures of religion even though they were offensive. That case was about whether a society accepts that certain expressions must remain lawful even when they provoke outrage or worse. Freedom of expression, Malka argued, does not exist only for consensual speech, nor for ideas that flatter prevailing moral sentiments. It exists precisely for what shocks, disturbs, contradicts.

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Malka later represented Mila, a 16-year-old girl subjected to an extraordinary wave of threats and harassment after she criticized Islam in a social media post. The girl had committed no crime, Malka argued, and yet she had effectively been purged from civil society. “I can’t get over the fact that she lives as a recluse,” he told the court. “Imagine her life, she can no longer walk peacefully, she can no longer do internships, all doors are closed to her.”  In this instance, it was those issuing the death threats who were on trial, but the case raised the same underlying question: does the right to free speech remain protected irrespective of the sensitivities of whoever may be offended by it? Or does the concept of harm expand if the identity group is sufficiently sensitive to offense?

In both cases, Malka defended a strict, almost classical understanding of free speech: the law does not exist to protect people from being offended, but to protect the conditions of open debate. It is increasingly rare to find people who defend this position, even in France, which is why I had contacted Malka years before my trial — when I had already begun to face professional consequences for stating that, in my view, being a woman refers to biological reality. For years I had been targeted by activists openly calling for violence against me, even for my death, all while promising legal defense funds for those willing to attack me. When the complaint was eventually filed, I knew who to call. 

In principle, French law still distinguishes between opinion and incitement. The offense at issue — provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence — traditionally requires something more than a harsh statement. It requires an actual call to hostility or exclusion. Marka’s colleague, Marine Viegas, made precisely this point: “I will not fall into the trap set by the civil parties,” she told the court. “For or against trans people? For or against gender identity? That is not what this case is about. The only question is whether, today, in a democratic society — ours — it is still permissible to debate this subject, the ideology it has produced, its excesses, and its taboos.” 

Viegas argued that my words did not target trans people as such, but a category of individuals defined by specific acts and circumstances — in other words men who exploit loose self-identification rules to enter women’s spaces and harm women. In French law, that distinction matters. It is not an offense to criticize people for their conduct. Viegas also pointed out what should have been obvious: there was no call to hatred in my words, no exhortation to attack, expel, discriminate against. At most, she said, it was “a measured recommendation”, rooted in documented facts and limited circumstances. As she concluded: “Forgive us for having dared to say that women should be cautious of rapists.” 

Viegas also made the peculiar inversion of victim and accusers central to the defense. She reminded the court that the associations prosecuting me claimed to act in the name of tolerance and protection, while aligning themselves, explicitly or implicitly, with people who had subjected me to sustained intimidation. She cited messages calling for me to be “burned alive”, “crushed”, or “destroyed”. Those same actors, she argued, had now come before a criminal court to demand the policing of a single phrase. When you “attack everything and everyone”, as she put it, you lose the ability to distinguish between hatred and disagreement. 

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That, indeed, is exactly what I believe this bizarre case illustrates. Asymmetry is now structural. Explicit threats can be minimized, contextualized, or ignored, provided they come from the “right” side of any given moral divide. But a statement grounded in observable reality becomes suspect, actionable, even prosecutable if it disrupts the dominant narrative. The legitimacy of the act becomes secondary to the identity of the speaker. Once that shift is complete, the law ceases to regulate behavior. Instead, it regulates who is allowed to speak and who must be silenced. 

Perhaps the most revealing move by the prosecution was the implication that I had dredged up some bizarre, malicious fantasy — that my worries about male offenders exploiting self-identification rules to enter women’s prisons was the lurid invention of a woman obsessed with discrediting trans people. But as my defense made absolutely clear, the prison issue was real and documented — and these people were not being criticized for being trans but for being violent criminals. 

That was my point, and it remains my point now. Not all trans-identified prisoners are dangerous. Perhaps the vast majority aren’t. But some are, and women should be able to discuss the consequences without being accused of hatred. 

What is particularly dismaying about all this is that France has long imagined itself as intellectually distinct from the Anglosphere — where these debates have been raging for a long time. The Republican tradition is, at least in theory, universalist. French citizens are treated as individuals, not as members of identity groups, and public debate can be abrasive, even confrontational, without automatically becoming a legal matter. This is now beginning to shift. What is being imported is not so much Anglo-American law, but Anglo-American ways of interpreting speech, in which disagreement is reframed as endangerment and criticism as a form of violence. 

In court, I was told that statements like mine could contribute to suicides among trans-identifying individuals. Such reasoning does not belong to traditional French legal culture. It belongs to a broader cultural shift, visible across parts of the Anglosphere, where the boundary between speech and harm has been progressively blurred in public discourse. 

This was also a central point in the defense. Marine Viegas insisted that my case was not a marginal provocation emerging from the “far Right”, but part of a wide and ongoing debate with implications for many sectors of French society. And yet the language used to police it is distinctly un-French. We have imported a distinctly alien cultural reflex. In her closing statement, Marine Viegas asked the question the court should have asked from the beginning: by what right should the French public be deprived of this debate? I believe it is the right question. 

In the end, my case is not about whether my sentence was elegant, diplomatic, or gentle. It is about whether women are still permitted to speak plainly about sex, risk, and bodily reality: when those realities conflict with the demands of gender ideology. If a woman can be prosecuted for saying something that basically all women know to be true, then free speech in France does not exist. It is being conditionally tolerated, and only so long as it does not disturb the reigning moral consensus. For that reason, if nothing else, we will appeal — for I cannot accept that women have no right to speak our truths.

Another, younger woman, is being dragged along by a man who is clearly a pimp. She sways as he shouts that she is “Only $20!” No one responds apart from a dealer who asks if he wants “Apache” (fentanyl).

Canada may have stringent alcohol restrictions and licensing in place in every province, but, on this street running 10 blocks, people turn a blind eye to addicts shooting up. And they are left to overdose on the street outside the legal “safe” injection site which has destigmatized the taking of illegal substances. The death rate here is 30 times higher than the national average. I hear tales, too, of young, mainly indigenous women who are marched into clinics by their pimps to access opiates for free; they become addicted and compliant.

There is a place here, though, which is supposed to provide respite for these women. The Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre purports to offer support, a bit of warmth and a free meal for anyone needing shelter, along with “safe washrooms”. Perhaps they aren’t quite as safe as some vulnerable women might wish, though, since female-only services for abused women and girls are illegal. And as the welcome sign reads: The Centre is inclusive of all self-identified women which includes trans women and two spirit people.

It wasn’t ever thus. One of the most inspirational and successful feminist organizations I have ever encountered was founded here in 1973. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter was led by the indomitable Lee Lakeman who sadly died last year. And she, along with her team, fought hard to protect that safe space for women.

But the self-declared “male feminist” Justin Trudeau fought back. And not for women’s rights. Although a big fan of posturing about indigenous people’s rights, he did little to protect these women and girls from the abuse they suffer. Meanwhile, he removed their right to safe spaces and decriminalized prostitution. In any case, in Canada anyone can be a woman.

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Vancouver has laws and policies in place that allow for men to self-identify as women. You may remember the case of the ball waxer supreme (then known as Jessica Yaniv, now known as Jessica Serenity Simpson). In 2019, Yaniv filed complaints against beauty salons in Vancouver run by women of immigrant background, for having refused to provide him with a “Brazilian” bikini wax (that is, the waxing of the female genital area). Yaniv lost — but only by the skin of his scrotum. The women lost too — in terms of both their livelihoods, and their peace of mind. One woman had to close down her home-based business as a result of the stress of the Yaniv case.

Aside from a small handful, all of the so-called feminist institutions and organizations go all out to support transgender ideology. The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), established in 1985 in order to fight cases on behalf of women relating to male violence and discrimination, is now full-throttle transactivist. Indeed, the first sentence under LEAF’s Mission and Vision section of its website describes it as a charity that works for “all women, girls, trans and non-binary people”, meaning everyone. “In Canadian society, cis and trans women, trans, intersex, gender diverse, gender nonconforming, gender queer, genderfluid, agender, bigender and non-binary people all experience discrimination based on their gender.”

Gender ideology has taken hold here in a way that makes Britain’s trans activists look meek, with liberal feminists welcoming the opening of domestic violence services to everyone. And any push-back comes almost exclusively from Right-wingers and radical feminists — who are roundly castigated.

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As a result, I know exactly the sort of abuse I am liable to be subject to whenever I do an event in Canada. There is screaming, jeering and intimidation. Sometimes there is spitting. There is always anger and the threat of violence. So the crowd that greeted me at an event about safe spaces for women (the irony escapes them, obviously) was no surprise.

But what was a surprise this time was that along with the jeers of “Nazis, bigots, fascist cunts”, some people were actually barking. And many of them were wearing animal masks. Since their aim was to intimidate, I wanted to show them that they hadn’t. So I approached them to quiz them about their feminism, only to have a placard shoved in my face by one young man that read: “Real feminists support ALL women.” The contrast between these privileged “feminists” with those tragic women I saw on the backstreets couldn’t have been starker. So much for the great successes of women such as Lee Lakeman.

During my visit, Trudeau was replaced by Carney. I wondered whether getting rid of him would change the landscape in Canada when it comes to the rights of women. Carney, though, is certainly keeping his mouth shut on the divisive issue. A firm believer in open markets and free trade, he is doubtless more focused on the economy rather than whether he is free to get along to the Pride parade. But the women I spoke to read that as cowardice; they suspect this man has no backbone when it comes to dealing with anything trickier than Trump’s tariffs.

They’re also very clear that the last thing they want is a Canadian Trump in the shape of Poilievre, the leader of the Conservatives. “He would do exactly what the orange man is doing,” said Sara, a long-time activist who works in a women’s shelter, “which is posturing about reversing all of the trans stuff, like men in women’s sports, whilst taking all of the other rights away, from abortion, to funding for Rape Crisis centres, and everything in between.”

Perhaps those young protesters who’ve grown up in Trudeau’s Canada, refusing to listen to what we aged feminists had to say about men’s violence, might learn something if they got out of their echo chambers and took a bus down to Downton Eastside. There they would see the damage done by men empowered by Trudeau’s policies, they would see vulnerable women victimised, abused and denied shelter.

“You should do the baby-led approach,” my friend said.

Baby-led weaning was coined in the early 2000s, and it advocates that, instead of parents spooning food into their baby’s mouth, they let the baby take the lead by feeding themselves, with parents putting a boiled piece of broccoli, say, or a small cup of hummus on the high-chair tray, which the baby can eat with their fingers. Baby-led weaning became so popular that the baby-led approach has expanded to all areas of early parenting, with baby-led sleeping, baby-led walking and baby-led potty training. Baby-led parenting, in other words.

I embraced the baby-led approach with enthusiasm that was really relief. Hell, I didn’t know how to do anything with these babies – I was just some idiot who put their nappies on the wrong way round every time. How marvellous I could delegate all complicated decisions to my infants! Now they wouldn’t scream at me anymore when I tried to make them do something they didn’t want, ie have a nap. The babies would be in charge.

This did not work out as well as I’d hoped. Baby-led weaning was fine. Baby-led sleeping, however, meant that none of us slept at all. It turned out that my babies were even more clueless than me about how they should be raised. And so, I returned to attempting to get them on a schedule, which they didn’t love, and it wasn’t always fun for me. But eventually, all three of us were sleeping at night.

The first generation of kids who grew up with the baby-led approach are now in their late teens and early 20s, and we are currently living in a baby-led world. Young people have always believed that they know better than the older generation, and now the older generation agrees with them. Middle-aged and experienced editors working in journalism and publishing live in fear of printing something that might displease the twenty-somethings who work in their company’s digital and publicity departments. Parents defer to their teenaged children about the correct languages to use and opinions to hold.

Some teachers even capitulate to the teenaged bullies in their class: last month, the Times reported that a girl in a London private school “was surrounded by up to 60 students who screamed and spat her” after she questioned gender ideology. “Teachers were initially supportive but withdrew their backing after the other sixth-formers accused the girl of transphobia, and the school ended up apologising for not maintaining a ‘safe-space’ in the sixth form,” wrote Nicola Woolcock, the paper’s education correspondent. This girl, ‘Kate’, was interviewed by Julie Bindel for UnHerd last week and she described overhearing her favourite teacher apologising for Kate’s “terrible, hateful behaviour”. Kate, who had only recently left hospital where she was being treated for anorexia, ended up leaving the school.

Babies are tyrants. If they don’t get their way, they cry, they scream as if the world is ending and no compromise is possible. Two babies screaming together, I can tell you from experience, is a nightmare. A pack of them is unimaginable, so I have some sympathy with the teachers at Kate’s school. Anyone who has ever raised a toddler might find the now regular Twitter meltdowns when someone’s employer hasn’t done exactly what they wanted strangely familiar. This is part of the reason the phrase “baby-led” is so alluring: no parent wants deal with a screaming tantrum, and no employer does either. So much easier to let the kids lead the way, even if it does lead to a Lord of the Flies-type scenario, with the adults fearfully letting the kids dictate the norms, as appears to have happened at Kate’s school.

Younger generations have always looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuffy old farts who came before – their parents, in other words – while also seeking an identity that confers upon them a set of ready-made beliefs and a supportive social group. This has become much harder with the dissolving of traditional barriers between adults and young people; parents chase social media likes as passionately as their children, the kids are listening to Harry Styles and Kate Bush, just like their mum and dad. In previous decades you could be a punk, or a skater, or a goth. For the current young generation, it’s being a social activist, and the changing parameters in discussions about race and, in particular, gender have become the defining generational divide. Telling your mum off for using the wrong words is great way to prove that she’s old and passé, even if she does still go to Glastonbury. A lot of good has come from this: today’s teenagers are far more clued up than we were in the Nineties, when jokes about disabled, fat, BAME and gay people were pretty much par for the course in any stand-up show and school playground. But a lot of deeply weird shifts have emerged from this, too, and all of them are due to us now living in a baby-led world, where the grown-ups are too scared to say “No”.

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Baby-led doctoring, for starters. In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?, provocateur Matt Walsh interviews American paediatric professor Dr Michelle Forcier, who is dressed in a toga and talks in the soothing, beatific voice of a cult leader. She says that children are ready to be put on medical treatment to change gender “when they ask for it”. By “medical treatment”, she means Lupron, which is now used as a puberty blocker on gender non-conforming children, but has been used in the past, Walsh rightly says, to chemically castrate sex offenders. Forcier wrongly insists that puberty blockers “don’t have permanent effects”, and ends the interview.

Forcier is not an outlier. Trans activists now argue that confused four-year-olds should be seen as analogous to trans adults. Not very long ago, I received an email from my children’s nursery to say that a three-year-old who I’ll call Daisy was now a boy and should be called Robert. As it happened, my three-year-old had, that same morning, informed me he was an astronaut, but it hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone (or NASA), and that’s because children’s identities are mutable. They are still discovering who they are, and that’s as true for three-year-olds as it is for 13-year-olds. By now, I’ve received several emails from parents I vaguely know, telling me their child — always under 15, invariably female — is trans and now goes by a new name. Those parents are, of course, only trying to support their child. But it is not supportive to publicly lock a child into an identity when, in a week, or month, or year, they will likely be a very different person.

In March, the Cass Report, an independent investigation into the quality of care for gender dysphoric young people in this country was published. It found that treatment by the NHS’s specialist Gender Identity Development Service had become mired in ideology, with clinicians too scared to raise concerns about rushing children into changing gender, or asking why girls are disproportionately now identifying as boys, lest they be accused of bigotry. If even doctors are too scared to press the brakes on unhappy children diagnosing themselves, what hope for parents?

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By Hadley Freeman

Discussions about gender are often described as “toxic”, and that means they are characterised by tantrums and threats from activists — again, arguing tactics that will be familiar to parents of teenagers and toddlers alike, and yet that does not diminish their effect. Parents have been terrorised into buying their unhappy teenage daughters binders to suppress their breasts because ignorant and bad faith organisations have told them — without any evidence — that not doing so will push their children towards suicide. Similarly bosses of liberal organisations have allowed feminists to be muffled and denounced so as to avoid censure from young activist employees.

Adults in their 40s and 50s — my generation — remember what it was like when we were teens. Many of us cringed at the words our parents used: “the blacks”, “poofters” and worse. We tried to tell them not to use those words, but there wasn’t the embarrassment then as there is now about being a bit bigoted. An adult didn’t gain anything, really, from being what was called then politically correct and what is now called woke. Like I said, things are different now, and that’s clearly a good thing. But in our rush to not repeat the mistakes our parents made, too often we have forgotten that, as well as loving and accepting our kids, it is our job to guide and safeguard them.

I was talking to a friend recently about a mutual friend whose daughter has said she is a boy, and so her mum bought her a chest binder, and I said how sad I found that. My friend was shocked by my sadness.

“But what would you do if your daughter wanted one?” she asked.

“I’d ask her what she thought she could do as a boy that she can’t do as a girl, and I’d ask if she wanted to be a boy, or did she want to be different person,” I said.

“But it’s the daughter’s choice,” my friend said.

“It would be her choice if she wanted to self-harm. But I wouldn’t buy her the razor,” I replied.

I don’t know if I’m right, but, like Kate, I was a very unhappy adolescent girl who was treated for anorexia. So I know a little about unhappy and confused adolescent girls, and how much we attack our own bodies to express that unhappiness. I also know what it’s like to be a desperate parent who just wants their kid to stop crying, to be happy and healthy and safe, and to feel like I’m a good parent who listens. The baby-led approach is an expression of that because sometimes (often) we don’t know what’s best for our kids, especially when it comes to a new issue like gender. But guess what? Your kid doesn’t know either, and nor, it seems, does anyone else who is supposed to safeguard them. Our kids aren’t breaking down barriers, they’re rock climbing without any safety ropes, and we’re encouraging it. It’s time for my generation to grow up, and be the adults.

Given the radical scope of activist ambitions — basically, to restructure the English language so that no one refers accurately to males and females in any context it might matter — you’d think that they would be a bit more sanguine about the likelihood of an uphill struggle. But not so — every new challenge is received like an incomprehensible and crushing blow, and much drama inevitably follows.

What is it that produces such childish regression in the initiates of the new gender religion? At least part of the answer seems to have to do with the example set by Stonewall. For years now, the charity has acted like a demented primary school teacher gone rogue, encouraging all sorts of unsavoury habits in those under its influence. Via the use of an elaborate reward chart — otherwise known as the UK Workplace Equality Index — it has sown widespread misunderstanding within hundreds of institutions about the actual state of equality law. It has scared people silly with lurid fairytales of murder, suicide threats, and the hate crime of “misgendering”. No wonder the more impressionable are now getting so worked up.

The latest example of Stonewall’s wayward moral leadership came at the weekend, when it was revealed that its flounce from the government’s scheduled “Safe To Be Me” LGBT rights conference will cost the taxpayer at least £650,000, and probably more. Having previously been paid to co-organise the conference, Stonewall’s withdrawal statement was larded with the usual purple prose: hearts were heavy about the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy, trust was shattered, and so on. You would think the government had just announced compulsory heterosexuality for all, and not a pause in legislation threatening to criminalise talking therapies for gender-questioning people, including for gay adolescents at risk of starting a medicalised pathway they might later regret.

Many of those fighting Stonewall’s agenda are mothers — or as the Stonewalled maternity hospital where I gave birth twice would now have it, “pregnant people”. Since the opposition seem desperate to project their serious mummy issues onto us anyway, I reckon we should just lean into it. As most mums know, it’s important to have a few strategies ready for when things get tricky. So — with a nod in solidarity to beleaguered adults across the land having to deal with transactivist drama in their organisations, homes, and friend groups — here are five supernanny-style rules from me.

1. Encourage them to use their words

As with toddlers, in transactivism there is a lot of shouting and stamping and strutting about, but not a lot of thinking. When next a transactivist intones a Stonewall-approved mantra or slogan at you, gently encourage them to use their words and unpack it a bit. For instance, you might ask: if any male who feels like a woman is a transwoman, and transwomen are women, what then is a woman? Don’t be put off by furious complaints that you must be a bigot for asking such a thing — this is a distraction.

Equally, you could ask them: if, as Stonewall tells us, “to be nonbinary is to exist outside of society’s confines and expectations”, then what does this mean for the countless gay people who have spent their lives facing discrimination and sometimes violence because they don’t fit heterosexual norms? How does having an interesting haircut stack up against that, exactly?

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Or if, as Stonewall’s new campaign on behalf of “asexuals” tells us, a “grey-asexual” is someone who “may experience sexual attraction very rarely or only under specific circumstances”,  while “demisexual people only experience sexual attraction after developing a strong emotional bond with someone”, then in fact, aren’t most of us either grey-asexual or demisexual? And more to the point, how on earth does any of this count as a political campaign worthy of large amounts of taxpayers’ money?

2. Praise the good

When raising offspring, it’s important to positively reinforce good behaviour when you see it. This can be an effective strategy with difficult people generally. Transactivists frequently claim that they want to break down regressive stereotypes about how males and females should be. If so, tell them this is fantastic! Give them lots of praise for it — though you might also ask them how they plan to smash stereotypes, when they also seem to think that playing with dolls and wearing dresses might turn a male child into a girl.

3. Set boundaries

This appears to be a particularly hard one for transactivists to accept, tending as they do to think that all boundaries are fascist — so start small. Begin by casually saying things like “apples can’t be oranges” and “tables can’t be chairs”. (If they get cross and start calling you the “fruit police” or the “furniture police”, calmly ignore). Eventually, work your way up to males and females in non-human species on earth: “bucks are not does”, “bulls are not heifers”, and so on.

Once that information is well-tolerated, gently introduce the idea that humans are a sexually dimorphic species too; and that, as with other species, we need mutually exclusive names for the two human sexes in order to talk clearly about them. And after this radical idea has taken root, you could perhaps start to talk about other kinds of boundary too.

For instance, you could talk about the physical boundaries of women’s changing rooms and dormitories and refuges, and what those boundaries are actually supposed to do to protect their occupants from male predation. Or you could talk about the personal boundaries of women who say they don’t want men in public spaces where they undress.

At all times throughout this process, maintain your own boundaries by example. A firm and consistent “no” will be your friend.

4. Ignore derailing attempts

Kids like to copy what you just said and repeat it back to you (“no, YOU are!”). Sometimes they do it just to annoy you. At other times, it’s because they want to argue the toss but don’t know how, so just parrot a version of what you just said in the hope it will stick. In a similar vein, some transactivists like to take points originally made by gender-critical feminists and throw them back, only lightly altered.

For instance, gender-critical feminists often express concerns about the lack of safe-guarding in self-ID policies, and about the negative effects of such policies on female survivors of male sexual violence. Not to be outdone, last week my former colleague and fervent transactivist Professor Alison Phipps wrote on twitter that: “When I go in a public toilet I am incredibly vigilant — I scrutinise every woman I come across and wonder whether she is a “gender-critical feminist”. Their obsession with what’s in everyone’s pants is frightening and as a cis woman and survivor, it makes me feel very unsafe”. Now, either this displays a level of paranoia on a par with Q-Anon worries about lizard people in the White House, or it’s an unsubtle attempt to wind gender-critical feminists up.

Or take Professor Grace Lavery of Berkeley University, in the UK to punt a new book about her penis on Woman’s Hour, and who gave a talk at UCL a few weeks ago. Lavery’s talk was entitled “The Gender Critical Movement Is the Biggest Threat to Academic Freedom in a Generation”. I am told that in the talk, my name came up — you know, that former Professor who got harassed out of her job for saying that biological sex matters —  as someone supposedly personally responsible for recent serious declines in academic freedom of thought.

As with the more junior version, mindless “no YOU ares” like those of Phipps and Lavery are likely to drag you into pointless back-and-forths, which is probably the intention. Try not to let it get to you. Do what mums have done since time immemorial and pour yourself a large gin. Take a swig and read this marvellously warm, perceptive, and witty piece by English scholars Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, written in response to an attempt of Grace Lavery — you know, that Professor who is Very Keen to protect academic freedom — to cancel them in 2018 for allegedly enabling transphobic “fascism” in their writing. (Their alleged crime, according to Lavery, was to defend the sometime use of trans birthnames and accurate sexed pronouns. And the cancellation attempt was eventually successful: the pair later released an abject apology, terrifying for its newly-leaden, generically contrite prose as much as for anything else.)

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In particular, as you read Castiglia and Reed’s piece, linger over these prescient words: “what we too often face today in the academy is something that looks less like activism or scholarship and more like adolescent acting-out. Now that scientists have decided that adolescence — itself a recently invented identity closely linked to advanced capitalism — persists into the third decade of human life, perhaps we should not be surprised to find behaviors associated with adolescents proliferating, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged within educational institutions. To be specific, we identify as adolescent the furious response to the discovery that others do not perceive you exactly the way you’d like to imagine to yourself”.

5. Get them out in the fresh air

This final one is simple enough. Get your transactivist troublemaker away from their screen or phone and into the great outdoors. Inhibit the flow of crazy pronouncements flying into innocent minds via LGBT organisations and bluetick accounts on Twitter. Encourage them instead to run around, take their shoes off and paddle, get muddy and out-of-breath, and generally to reconnect with their physical bodies and the natural world.

And if a member of the opposite sex is around, why not encourage them to arm-wrestle each other, or have a throwing contest? They both might learn something interesting. Perhaps this teaching moment could even feed into later conversations about transwomen in women’s sport

But the joy, the pleasure of my embodied reality is worth it. I know exactly when my period is due, the sensation of ovulation and the micro-weight gains pre-period that affect my balance, my flexibility and my confidence. I understand the pressures of aesthetics, the desire to be thin, to be ripped, to be long limbed, to be fast and athletic. It’s never ending what you should or could be as a female body in my artform.

I am a dancer and choreographer and have been making work since graduating from London Contemporary Dance School in 1998. I set up my eponymous dance company in 2004, and would regularly tour the UK, Europe and the USA. My work includes 5 Soldiers and MK Ultra which explored conspiracy theory through the lens of pop stars, music video imagery and Britney Spears. I dance, I teach, I speak, and I collaborate.

The body is at the heart of my work and research. To explore the idea of how we inhabit our bodies, I have joined an all-male infantry battalion to train with soldiers, I have been on the beat with West Midlands Police, I have worked with children and teenagers. I have tried to understand the pain women feel about their identity, their changing body in puberty, their sexuality and their confined role in society. I’ve trowelled through the internet and dived into conspiracy theory.

At times, face-masked in mud, helmet and body armour on, clutching an SA 80, I felt more macho than any man I’d ever met. Leaping out of windows, throwing grenades, I felt as cocky and dangerous as any human could ever be. Dressed for a dinner at a private country estate, dangling earrings and floor length gown, I could not feel more feminine. But these are gender stereotypes. These are roles that say soldier = boy, dancer = girl. I stand on the front line of the gender debate, challenging myself and everyone around me, and it’s easier than it looks. You just have to engage your mind, engage your body and be in time in space in the present.

But the frontline of the gender debate is a dangerous place to be. Which is why today I find myself without a dance company, ostracised by my former executive co-director and my board of trustees.

I was shunned following a party at my house during which I disclosed that my new work would be based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando and I revealed my growing unease around the erasure of the word “women” and the biological denialism associated with Gender Ideology.

I did not intend to cause offence or make this about individuals — my ideas were forming and I wanted to have robust debate to find out what the other side thought. But to even float these thoughts in the privacy of my own home was deemed beyond the pale. I was subsequently accused of transphobia and have been investigated for bigotry by my own company. Last week, I decided that I no longer had any trust in my board, and that they had abused the grievance policy of the company to unfairly investigate me. I had no option but to resign, citing constructive dismissal in the hope that I might take back control of my life and my creativity. They tried to silence and shut me down; the next day they took my phone and personal email accounts that were intertwined with the company I founded. I’ve endured dishonest and gross misrepresentations of my views spoken and written about me, and I have quietly tried to maintain my sense of self, my sense of humour and my sanity.

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I believe adult people have the right to be, to feel and to identify any way they want. I do believe, though, that if we erase the word women, if we stop it meaning a biologically based sex class, it becomes a word that can include any male who self-IDs and by doing so we erase women’s rights, the women’s movement and the very basis of attacking and naming sexism and misogyny. The idea that to even state that “a woman is a woman” is extremist or transphobic is deeply chilling and totally false.

The past few years have been dominated by the gender debate online, with the defining moment of the JK Rowling statement, and her eloquent exploration of defending the trans community, defending women, and attempting to explain how domestic violence so affects us as women, and that asking for same sex protections is not in itself transphobic. In fact, in our desperate desire to explain our mistrust of men, so many women have had to re-traumatise themselves, dredging up pain and hurt from the past, as I have done, to help to try to explain just how scared we all really are.

Throughout history it is the artists and the intellectuals who are shut down first — those who dare to question the status quo, or are the first to notice cultural shifts. As artists it is our job to be thinking ahead, following trends, thinking through the eventual outcomes or legacy of new waves of thought. And while my feminism burns bright, I was still feeling uncertain as to what was the right approach to this new way of thinking and talking. I wanted to do the right thing, I wanted to be inclusive, I am a modern progressive artist, I can adapt, change, shift my norms.

So I began looking for a novel or a book that I could hang a lot of my sex and gender questions on, reading, researching, studying Olympe de Gouges who wrote the amazing tenant of Rights for Women, the French Revolution and its betrayal of rights for all (and certainly not for women), sexual politics, and returning to second wave Angela Carter, bell hooks, Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir.

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Then I came to Orlando. I saw the film, and then read the book, and I was utterly blown away. I had found Virginia Woolf pretty impenetrable as a young woman; but when I sat down with it this time, I read it in a heightened state over two fabulous days. I knew I’d fallen in love — with Orlando, with Virginia, and then after reading the letters between Virginia and Vita Sackville West (as recommended by the local LGBT reading group), I fell in love with Vita too. I was so inspired byWoolf’s third way of approaching all of this muddled and difficult stuff.

Orlando absolutely is a man at the start of the novel, a privileged, precocious boy, beautiful, charming, rich, aristocratic. He falls in love, he loses in love, he writes dreadful poetry, he is humiliated, he is confronted with real warfare and can not cope with his “manly role” to fight and he goes to sleep. When Orlando awakes, she is a woman. A total sex change. A different-sexed body, a thing that even with modern medicine, hormone treatment and surgery, can never, ever be achieved. But humans have the power of imagination. There isn’t one woman alive who hasn’t imagined what her life would be like had she been born a man, the freedoms, the right to pleasure, the right to self.

The problem, Woolf seems to suggest, is no man has really, deeply, truly thought about this the other way around. Men have still not truly grasped the radical notion that a woman is a fully created, total, embodied human being, worth exactly the same as any man. The fact that then Orlando does have a wonderfully wicked time in Georgian England (a time where at least 20% of all women and girls in London worked in the sex trade), is both delightful, titillating and fun.

Remember, it would take until the Sixties and the contraceptive pill before any woman could have sex with a man and not be concerned about the consequences of pregnancy, and what that meant for her and her baby’s future. Woolf knows that women and men are not so dissimilar. We have wants, needs, and desires, but we do not have equal treatment, in the eyes of society or in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, even the GRA of 2003 made sure that no woman could change gender to be a man in order to inherit aristocratic wealth. Exactly as in Orlando all those years before. Some things don’t change…

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Unfortunately, because of my attempt to articulate my gender critical beliefs, I now find myself without a company and without an Orlando. I stand accused of transphobia, which is damaging to the trans community, to women and to me and my reputation as an artist. But I must defend myself, defend my views and stand with the other, incredibly brave women and men who are speaking out against this dangerous ideology. The oppression of women is based entirely on our biology and our reproductive rights and vulnerabilities. We embody our oppression and our strength.

I feel this powerfully in my own body. A dancer’s body, but also a woman’s body; a body that has been raped, assaulted, attacked, strangled, knocked out and abused. My body has been in deep pain, physical and mental. My body has been a victim, that has scars running deep — on my scalp and in my soul. But it is also a body that has created, nurtured and given life. A body that coped with pregnancy, that survived an emergency birth, and then breastfed an infant until he was 30 months. A body of beauty, miracle, love and care. A body that sat in local cafes, shamed me with my bursting boobs, leaking nipples and abundant health. A body that was met, even as an infant suckled, with tuts and looks from by passers — the old judging my openness, the young unable to see boobs as anything but sex objects. I sat there, ashamed but not understanding why until I realised that I felt like an an animal. I was an animal. It shocked me. I couldn’t identify out of my life-giving properties. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t female; I was a woman, a mother, a life giver, yet I wasn’t respected or liked or even tolerated because of it.

Something changed in me. Something deep, and I became braver, fiercer, angry even, about how badly women are treated. And it certainly wasn’t just me — it was all my friends, all those forceps births, split and cut vaginas, c-sections, dangerous births, the refusal to give any kind of painkillers, husbands and partners banned from the birthing room. And then there is the aftermath: the refusal to learn your baby’s name. The infantilising of you and your body and your baby, despite being a grown-up professional woman. I felt like I was 10 years old and being told off. The moment of sheer relief when one midwife treated you and your body with respect and compassion. Often the most overworked and exhausted of women who still hung onto a modicum of love and respect for our bodies and babies.

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This body, my body, it’s been through so much. But it is a dancing body, a body with more to give and to learn than ever before.

My body is why I challenge the belief that we are walking meat sacks. How can it be that we are just flesh, blood, fluids, nerves, muscles, bones. That we are nothing alive, we have nothing to feel, nothing to give pleasure. It is this sort of “transhumanistic philosophy”, that we are merely a brain homunculus behind two jiggling eyes, which is the destroyer of women, of our innate power in the universe, of our understanding that we are mammals, we live on a finite planet, we eat and we shit and we make love and we birth babies and we orgasm and we feel pain and we feel hurt and some of it is from outside of us and some it we invent inside ourselves.

We only have this life, this existence and this time on this planet. We cannot invent a new planet, we cannot pretend we do not exist, we cannot pretend our bodies are not ours. We are more than the sum of our parts, we are our bodies, minds and consciousnesses. We are only just now starting to truly understand the connectivity between our minds, bodies, nature and the planet.

So I say no to the new puritans, the sex deniers and the body snatchers. No to erasure of my sex, no to erasure of my boundaries and my safety. You are asking far, far too much and we know it. We must, and always must, state our truth of our own existence.