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    It’s easy to roll our eyes at trans issues. But what if we’re wrong? Jeremy Clarkson Jeremy Clarkson Next image › As we all know, JK Rowling recently expressed an opinion on the transgender debate, and she wasn’t just cancelled, she was erased. They put her in the delete bin, and then afterwards, all her former fans, and even the actors and actresses she’d made famous, emptied the bin into a landfill site so seagulls could feast on her eyes. Mercifully, I’ve always known I would not suffer a similar fate, because I’ve always had exactly the same views on transgenderism as I do on Victorian literature or trees. It’s not something that’s ever interested me, so why should I bother forming an opinion on it? If I want to get fed to the seagulls, I could think of a million other ways of going about it, all of which would be far more satisfying than calling Eddie Izzard a man or laughing at Sam Smith’s insistence that an interest in angling makes you a “fisherthem”. The fact is that I don’t know any transgender people. I once saw a very tall lady in Selfridges who had an Adam’s apple and hairy hands, but that’s it. That’s my only actual real-world experience of the issue and it left me completely underwhelmed. However, in recent times, the transgender issue has come to dominate the news so completely that I’ve been forced to pay a bit more attention. We are being asked whether schoolchildren should be allowed to change gender and whether a man can go to a women’s prison. This is big stuff, when you think about it. And there’s more. In the past week alone, there’s been a row about the new gender-neutral lavatories at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and we learnt that officers in the Metropolitan Police are to be stopped from investigating crime so they can spend more time learning about “faer” and the hundred or so different pronoun options that are available to modern-day youth. And then there was Baroness Fox, who was uninvited to speak on the cancel culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, because she’d retweeted a Ricky Gervais joke about transgender people. Meanwhile, we have Piers Morgan, who’s making a good living from the debate, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, whose charity will now be supporting the Global Boyhood Initiative, which challenges traditional gender roles. Oh, and on Thursday, World Athletics, the governing body for those who like to run around and jump over things, announced that anyone who went through male puberty may not take part in female events unless they are — deep breath — DSD (differences of sex development) intersex people whose testosterone levels have been below 2.5 nanomoles per litre for a period of at least two years. It would be easy at this point to roll your eyes and think the world’s gone mad. But hang on a minute. Because what if you’re wrong? When I was at school in the Seventies, we were aware that the homosexual act was kind of technically possible, but the notion that anyone would do such a thing was of course laughable. And then a few years after Rock Hudson died of Aids, Freddie Mercury got it and died too. We were in shock. You mean he . . . you know? And then Elton John announced he had a predilection for members of the same genital grouping. And suddenly the floodgates opened. In school we’d always joked that one of the teachers was gay, then it turned out he was. And so was one of our friends. And now, just 40 years on, I feel weird for never having tried it. I went to a gay wedding last year and in January I spent a happy week cruising (on a boat) round the Caribbean with a gay couple. And it’s not a recent thing, either. It wasn’t invented by Alan Turing. Leonardo da Vinci was gay. So, probably, was Richard I, and James VI, and Florence Nightingale. Sir Ian McKellen reckons even Shakespeare swung both ways. Gayness, then, has been around since the very beginning. Well, not the very beginning obviously — we wouldn’t have got far if Eve had been a lesbian — but close to the beginning. So, what if it’s the same deal with transgenderism? Has that also been going on for years? Will we discover in the coming decades that half those brave Tommies in the First World War trenches were secretly hoping to have their old chaps shot off so they could go home and put on a frock? Think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body We know that in the early 20th century, a boy in California decided he was a girl. She called herself Lucy, married a man and, when that failed, opened a brothel. Where, during a routine venereal disease check, it was discovered that she had a penis. So, off she went to prison. And that, to me, has some troubling Turing overtones. I realise, of course, that the whole trans debate has been hijacked by lunatics who glue themselves to stuff and claim to be from a gender that doesn’t even exist, and I know too that there is some kind of civil war going on between fiercely women women and women who just say they’re women. This creates a noise that’s annoying to most of us, but think how infuriating it must be to those who really were born in the wrong body. I believe that this is possible and I accept that it creates several problems for society, and not just in the lavatory or in a prison or in the school high-jump competition. But how can we address these issues when every teenage halfwit is muddying the waters by claiming to identify as a bat and inventing a pronoun that wouldn’t even be allowed in a game of Scrabble? “Faer”, my arse.

    Jeremy Clarkson asks ‘What if you’re wrong about trans people?’

    Lee Hurley -
    In a recent Sunday Times column, Jeremy Clarkson discussed the prevalence of transgender issues in the news and, although he makes jokes and uses problematic language throughout the piece, he posed an important question: "What if you're wrong?"
    A photo of a woman at a Pride event holding a sign painted with the trans flag that reads "We heart our trans community".

    Trans Writes.World Soft-Launch

    Gemma Stone -
    I did hope to have everything sorted out fully by today, #TransDayOfVisibility, but sometimes the stars don’t align just right and you get super busy with other projects and neglect the one that doesn’t currently help pay your bills. Instead my co-founder and I have decided to do a soft-launch of our new trans led site for platforming and elevating transgender voices around the world. Welcome to Trans Writes.world
    nhs rainbow

    Proposed NHS guidance for trans kids puts health of a generation at risk

    hazelmoon -
    Even now in 2022 the NHS remains the largest non-military public organisation on earth, with values designed to improve the lives of every single person in the UK… Unless, it seems, you’re transgender.
    wpath files

    Understanding the “WPATH Files” debate

    Lee Hurley -
    The biggest ‘story’ doing the rounds at the minute is that anti-trans activists have released a series of documents they call the "WPATH Files" but, as usual, they're nonsense
    An image from Sapporo rainbow pride in 2019, the same year Law 111 was last upheld in Japan. The Image shows hundreds of people walking below rainbow balloons. Credit: Miki Yoshihito via Wikimedia Commons

    Law 111: Japan’s trans sterilisation now unconstitutional, Supreme Court rules

    Mako Nakajima -
    In order to change their gender marker Japanese people have had to submit to trans sterilisation via Law 111. However a recent Supreme Court ruling has found this to be unconstitutional, covering this momentous change for Japanese trans people, Mako Nakajima writes;
    Press photo of Sajid Javid MP, a candidate in the tory leadership race

    Frightening law change; Sajid Javid to invade medical confidentiality for 1000s of children

    Gemma Stone -
    Articles posted to The Daily Mail and The Times are making claims that Health Secretary Sajid Javid is looking to change the law regarding record keeping for trans patients with the NHS. This is allegedly an attempt to aid in the ongoing Cass Review
    rosie duffield

    Rosie Duffield’s Times trans article, Labour and Policy Exchange

    Lee Hurley -
    Rosie Duffield has so many complaints about her transphobia that Labour allegedly has an email folder dedicated to her alone. With staffers reportedly instructed...
    A large black and white Twitch.tv logo

    Twitch streamer Keffals announces trans charity stream

    Gemma Stone -
    The line-up for the event is set to have "many more" guests will be revealed as events unfold. Starting 4:00pm EST April 29th and continuing on April 30th 2022 (Which is 8pm in GMT and 9pm in BST.) The fundraiser is ran through the Tiltify program used by creators such as JackSepticEye for his annual #Thankmas campaigns. Keffals has already reached $2,865.11 of her $10,000 goal at time of writing, before the stream has even started!

    What does Liz Truss’s anti-trans bill actually say?

    Lee Hurley -
    Liz Truss returned from the US a few weeks ago and has now published her anti-trans legislative proposal that seems very similar to the...
    A picture of the welcome to England sign on the Scottish English border but has been edited to ask people to have their gender ready for inspection. A meme created to make fun of England's reaction to Scottish gender reforms

    Why the UK Government will fail to undermine Scottish gender reforms; even if it...

    Beth Douglas -
    On the 22nd of December, after 7 years of intense toxic debate, the Scottish Parliament finally voted through the Gender Recognition Reforms bill. Since then the UK Government has outlined two plans to undermine Scottish gender reforms. Both plans have massive ramifications and will fail.
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