The Trans Agenda #11
[18 March 2024]
Welcome to The Trans Agenda, a newsletter that will arrive in your inbox Monday to Friday if you are subscribed. You can also read it on Substack and on Trans Writes.
Publications known for taking an anti-trans stance are and will be referenced and linked. Often, these are the most comprehensive sources for these stories because of their obsession with trans people. I give a summary for those stories so you can make the choice if you want to click the link or seek out more information elsewhere.
TL;DR
- Ferrets defeat Liz Truss.
- Teen charged in murder of transgender woman in Detroit.
- LGBT content in relationships education debate today.
- New Welsh Labour leader elected in European first.
- New Conservative splinter faction write their own manifesto.
- Rishi Sunak plans more tax cuts.
- Reform UK partner with Northern Ireland’s TUV.
- Ron DeSantis accuses Libs of TikTok of ‘lying’ for clicks.
- Today’s papers.
- Weekend papers.
- Any other business.
- plus more…
NEWS & POLITICS
Ferrets delay Liz Truss’s anti-trans bill
- A cross-party effort on Friday saw MPs filibuster about ferrets while debating the Animal Welfare (Import of Dogs, Cats and Ferrets) Bill in order to stop Liz Truss’s Health and Equality Acts (Amendment) Bill making it to the floor. It has now been relisted for 22 March but at the bottom of the list, meaning it won’t get heard that day, either. In what was one of the most hilarious scenes in the House of Commons for a long time, MPs talked, at length, about ferrets, including one called ‘Oscar’ who has now achieved a level of fame online. As an added bonus, Truss and Kemi Badenoch were both furious, tweeting afterwards blaming Labour MPs for stopping them debating ‘single sex spaces’, which, of course, is not at all what the bill is about. If it was, it would be called the ‘Single Sex Facility (Assholes) Bill, or something. In reality, both Labour and Tory MPs conspired to stop Truss’s bill being read. You can read the LGB Alliance’s fury here while also watching some of the hilarious ferret-based debate.The ferret has now become a symbol of trans resistance.
New Welsh Labour leader elected in European first
- Vaughan Gething has been elected Welsh Labour leader, defeating Jeremy Miles, with 52% of the vote. He is the first Black head of government in Europe. In 2024.
House of Commons library is initiating a service designed to assist MPs in fact-checking conspiracy theories [Sun on Sunday]
- Commons officials are introducing an online Q&A session next week and will provide training on addressing conspiracy theories and antisemitism later this year. Given the current government are one of the largest spreaders of conspiracy theories, this seems long overdue.
New Conservative splinter faction write their own manifesto [Daily Mail]
- A group of right-wing Conservative MPs, calling themselves the New Conservatives and led by co-chair and anti-trans activist Miriam Cates, is drafting an independent election manifesto to influence the main Tory election platform. They aim to offer policy ideas on tax (lower), immigration (none), education (no trans kids), and online safety. This comes as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak struggles to unify the party amidst rapidly declining support. In case you’re confused by all these factions, Liz Truss is in one of the other ones, laughably called the Popular Conservatives.Cates, who is anti-abortion, also had a full page in the Mail on Sunday where she said women should ‘have babies before it is too late.’
![Women should have babies before it’s too late, not be tricked into uselessly freezing their eggs In an era when they’re increasingly urged to put career before family, Tory MP and mother-of-three Miriam Cates argues... The Mail on Sunday17 Mar 2024By GLEN OWEN POLITICAL EDITOR STRONG VIEWS: Mrs Cates warns women are being lulled into a false sense of security AT WHAT age should women try to start a family? Politicians tend to tread with the lightest of footfalls through such moral minefields, but Miriam Cates tackles the subject head-on. ‘The stats show if you are not a mother by 35 you have got only a one-in-four chance of becoming a mother. If you are not a mother by 30 you have got only a 50 per cent chance,’ she says. She immediately clarifies that the figures don’t relate to the chances of becoming pregnant at that age when trying – it is the proportion of women who will go on to have children if they have not done so by then, for whatever reason. ‘There is a biological-possibility window, which for most people is 16 to 40, but we know after late 20s that the chances go down and down, so if you really want to be a parent then your best chance is sooner rather than later.’ This is not to suggest that Mrs Cates, a 41-year-old mother-of-three, is oblivious to the pressures on women to be financially secure before they start trying for children, she just believes that the Government should use more policy levers to help them juggle their responsibilities. Mrs Cates, the co-chair of the powerful New Conservatives caucus of Right-wing MPs, is setting out her vision for the sort of policies which the struggling Tories should be offering to win back support. If Rishi Sunak’s polling figures do not improve, her 7,200 majority in Penistone and Stocksbridge will vanish at the next election. MRS CATES, a former biology teacher, had her first child aged 25, when her husband David was working as a tech consultant. She worries that women are being lulled into a false sense of security by the offer of freezing their eggs, or using other IVF procedures, to delay the decision into their late 30s. ‘Egg freezing doesn’t work,’ she says baldly. ‘A tiny percentage of people who freeze their eggs will ever become pregnant. ‘By the time women think about doing this, for obvious reasons they are thinking, “my biological clock is ticking, I’ve not met the right guy, I’m not ready to settle down”. ‘But, unfortunately, if you freeze your eggs after the age of 35 or so they are not good quality enough to likely result in a later pregnancy, and I think it is quite unethical for commercial companies to be targeting women. ‘There are some big corporations that will pay for women to do this, and I believe it is really exploitative because it’s saying we want to retain you in the workplace and so we will give you false promises. ‘When you see all these celebrities in the paper who have had a baby aged 47, it never says if it is surrogacy or IVF – or if they have been unbelievably lucky.’ The MP admits that given the plethora of factors involved in the decision there is not a ‘right’ age to settle on, saying: ‘The big factors for most women are do they have a partner that they want to be the father of their children and are they financially settled. ‘There are also some policy angles that the Government needs to work on, such as better housing, that could get the problems out of the way so that people can have the children they say they want.’ Mrs Cates, a Christian who has been called the ‘Mary Whitehouse of the Commons’ – after the 1970s morality campaigner because of the strong moral streak running through her political beliefs – says: ‘I think there is absolutely a role for people of religious faith in public life [but] Tony Blair was told not to “do God” and he has not done so since then.’ The Scottish Government is also in Mrs Cates’ line of fire for spending hundreds of thousands running an advertising campaign pushing egg donation. She says: ‘They are using taxpayers’ money to convince young women to go through what is a very traumatic and potentially dangerous process of egg donation without really explaining what this means – someone else will have your genetic child, and may be identifiable to that child when they are 18. Egg donation means months of hormone injections, having your ovaries inflated and a quite traumatic internal process to remove those eggs. I think it is quite unethical for the Scottish Government to be doing that.’ Mrs Cates is also uneasy about the use of surrogate mothers, saying it is ‘not much thought about’ other than those ‘stories in a soap opera where somebody becomes a surrogate for her sister who’s infertile – that kind of thing’. She says: ‘We think a lot about people who are infertile, people who desperately want to be parents and can’t, and of course I have every sympathy for people in that situation. But I think it is also really important to think about the baby’s rights and the baby’s welfare, and I don’t think that we think enough about what it means to actually take a baby off its mother at birth.’ Mrs Cates adds: ‘When the baby is born it knows its mother’s voice – it’s connected to its mother even if it’s not the mother’s genetic baby. The bits of the baby’s DNA stay in the mother for years and years and years – there is already a connection at birth. So taking the baby off that mother is not a neutral thing. I would always come down on the side of the most vulnerable party, which is the baby.’ Older children also need protecting, Mrs Cates believes, from the risks posed by smartphones, which she says could be mitigated by limiting the functions available to the under-16s. She says: ‘No kid had a smartphone before 2010 and now pretty much every single secondary school-age child – and increasing numbers of primary school kids – have them, so I think we need to raise the age of social media accounts from 13 to 16. ‘Companies are developing hardware that looks like a smartphone but it doesn’t do all the things a smartphone does – you can see a map, you can buy a train ticket but you definitely can’t view porn.’ Egg freezing doesn’t work – companies just target women Blair was told not to “do God” – and he hasn’t since then IT IS astonishing that the position of women, and especially that of mothers, is so little discussed in our politics. The past 60 years have seen multiple revolutions in the status of women, in the nature of family life and perhaps, above all, in the way we raise the next generation. Some of these changes have been driven by deliberate Leftwing social policy and militant feminism. Some have suited business very well, as it has benefited hugely from the expansion of the female workforce and the vast reservoir of talent this has drawn on. Some have their roots in the lingering effects of the Second World War, which placed terrible strains on so many young families and led to far more widespread divorce, and which caused far more women to go out to do paid work than had ever done so before. Others are the result of medical and scientific change, from the invention of the contraceptive pill to the development of labour-saving devices in the home. The rapid growth of mass car ownership has made it first possible and then almost compulsory for young women to multi-task as both mothers in the home and workers outside the home. The results have been the usual mixture of good and bad, but Conservative politicians have tended to go rather too readily with the flow, endorsing or accepting radical changes without – as they should do – asking if they are beneficial to our society. So we should welcome the thoughts of Miriam Cates MP in her interview today in The Mail on Sunday, as a starting point for a very necessary debate. Ms Cates, who is refreshingly willing to think aloud and to fight her corner, is rightly concerned about the pressures on women who pursue careers and motherhood together, often trying to postpone parenthood. She says the vast majority of young women do want to become mothers but that there are many reasons why they don’t have children at the time they want to. She is correct. The relentless passage of time, in reality, greatly limits the opportunity to choose parenthood. Yet despite all the pressures of liberal media, economic need and fashion, many people – both men and women – still rather like the idea of enjoying as much traditional family life as they can reasonably arrange. Many would probably have more children, sooner, if they could find the time and the money, but generally if you have the one, you cannot have the other. Some European countries are considerably more generous to young families, through their tax and benefits systems, than we are. Surely it would not be unconservative to wonder if we might move in this direction. Other problems – of good, reliable and affordable childcare, and of housing in a tough market – also need some attention. So it is a very good thing that Ms Cates is raising this problem. If the Tory Party is to regain its standing and its ability to win elections (which is an urgent task) it needs to offer a thoughtful and unwoke approach to social policy, rather than just follow in the footsteps of Blairism, as it has been all too ready to do. Perhaps there is a Conservative future after all. Article Name:Women should have babies before it’s too late, not be tricked into uselessly freezing their eggs Publication:The Mail on Sunday Author:By GLEN OWEN POLITICAL EDITOR Start Page:17 End Page:17](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5e420f0e-8339-492b-b4f8-67d4a0585024_558x715.png "Women should have babies before it’s too late, not be tricked into uselessly freezing their eggs In an era when they’re increasingly urged to put career before family, Tory MP and mother-of-three Miriam Cates argues... The Mail on Sunday17 Mar 2024By GLEN OWEN POLITICAL EDITOR STRONG VIEWS: Mrs Cates warns women are being lulled into a false sense of security AT WHAT age should women try to start a family? Politicians tend to tread with the lightest of footfalls through such moral minefields, but Miriam Cates tackles the subject head-on. ‘The stats show if you are not a mother by 35 you have got only a one-in-four chance of becoming a mother. If you are not a mother by 30 you have got only a 50 per cent chance,’ she says. She immediately clarifies that the figures don’t relate to the chances of becoming pregnant at that age when trying – it is the proportion of women who will go on to have children if they have not done so by then, for whatever reason. ‘There is a biological-possibility window, which for most people is 16 to 40, but we know after late 20s that the chances go down and down, so if you really want to be a parent then your best chance is sooner rather than later.’ This is not to suggest that Mrs Cates, a 41-year-old mother-of-three, is oblivious to the pressures on women to be financially secure before they start trying for children, she just believes that the Government should use more policy levers to help them juggle their responsibilities. Mrs Cates, the co-chair of the powerful New Conservatives caucus of Right-wing MPs, is setting out her vision for the sort of policies which the struggling Tories should be offering to win back support. If Rishi Sunak’s polling figures do not improve, her 7,200 majority in Penistone and Stocksbridge will vanish at the next election. MRS CATES, a former biology teacher, had her first child aged 25, when her husband David was working as a tech consultant. She worries that women are being lulled into a false sense of security by the offer of freezing their eggs, or using other IVF procedures, to delay the decision into their late 30s. ‘Egg freezing doesn’t work,’ she says baldly. ‘A tiny percentage of people who freeze their eggs will ever become pregnant. ‘By the time women think about doing this, for obvious reasons they are thinking, “my biological clock is ticking, I’ve not met the right guy, I’m not ready to settle down”. ‘But, unfortunately, if you freeze your eggs after the age of 35 or so they are not good quality enough to likely result in a later pregnancy, and I think it is quite unethical for commercial companies to be targeting women. ‘There are some big corporations that will pay for women to do this, and I believe it is really exploitative because it’s saying we want to retain you in the workplace and so we will give you false promises. ‘When you see all these celebrities in the paper who have had a baby aged 47, it never says if it is surrogacy or IVF – or if they have been unbelievably lucky.’ The MP admits that given the plethora of factors involved in the decision there is not a ‘right’ age to settle on, saying: ‘The big factors for most women are do they have a partner that they want to be the father of their children and are they financially settled. ‘There are also some policy angles that the Government needs to work on, such as better housing, that could get the problems out of the way so that people can have the children they say they want.’ Mrs Cates, a Christian who has been called the ‘Mary Whitehouse of the Commons’ – after the 1970s morality campaigner because of the strong moral streak running through her political beliefs – says: ‘I think there is absolutely a role for people of religious faith in public life [but] Tony Blair was told not to “do God” and he has not done so since then.’ The Scottish Government is also in Mrs Cates’ line of fire for spending hundreds of thousands running an advertising campaign pushing egg donation. She says: ‘They are using taxpayers’ money to convince young women to go through what is a very traumatic and potentially dangerous process of egg donation without really explaining what this means – someone else will have your genetic child, and may be identifiable to that child when they are 18. Egg donation means months of hormone injections, having your ovaries inflated and a quite traumatic internal process to remove those eggs. I think it is quite unethical for the Scottish Government to be doing that.’ Mrs Cates is also uneasy about the use of surrogate mothers, saying it is ‘not much thought about’ other than those ‘stories in a soap opera where somebody becomes a surrogate for her sister who’s infertile – that kind of thing’. She says: ‘We think a lot about people who are infertile, people who desperately want to be parents and can’t, and of course I have every sympathy for people in that situation. But I think it is also really important to think about the baby’s rights and the baby’s welfare, and I don’t think that we think enough about what it means to actually take a baby off its mother at birth.’ Mrs Cates adds: ‘When the baby is born it knows its mother’s voice – it’s connected to its mother even if it’s not the mother’s genetic baby. The bits of the baby’s DNA stay in the mother for years and years and years – there is already a connection at birth. So taking the baby off that mother is not a neutral thing. I would always come down on the side of the most vulnerable party, which is the baby.’ Older children also need protecting, Mrs Cates believes, from the risks posed by smartphones, which she says could be mitigated by limiting the functions available to the under-16s. She says: ‘No kid had a smartphone before 2010 and now pretty much every single secondary school-age child – and increasing numbers of primary school kids – have them, so I think we need to raise the age of social media accounts from 13 to 16. ‘Companies are developing hardware that looks like a smartphone but it doesn’t do all the things a smartphone does – you can see a map, you can buy a train ticket but you definitely can’t view porn.’ Egg freezing doesn’t work – companies just target women Blair was told not to “do God” – and he hasn’t since then IT IS astonishing that the position of women, and especially that of mothers, is so little discussed in our politics. The past 60 years have seen multiple revolutions in the status of women, in the nature of family life and perhaps, above all, in the way we raise the next generation. Some of these changes have been driven by deliberate Leftwing social policy and militant feminism. Some have suited business very well, as it has benefited hugely from the expansion of the female workforce and the vast reservoir of talent this has drawn on. Some have their roots in the lingering effects of the Second World War, which placed terrible strains on so many young families and led to far more widespread divorce, and which caused far more women to go out to do paid work than had ever done so before. Others are the result of medical and scientific change, from the invention of the contraceptive pill to the development of labour-saving devices in the home. The rapid growth of mass car ownership has made it first possible and then almost compulsory for young women to multi-task as both mothers in the home and workers outside the home. The results have been the usual mixture of good and bad, but Conservative politicians have tended to go rather too readily with the flow, endorsing or accepting radical changes without – as they should do – asking if they are beneficial to our society. So we should welcome the thoughts of Miriam Cates MP in her interview today in The Mail on Sunday, as a starting point for a very necessary debate. Ms Cates, who is refreshingly willing to think aloud and to fight her corner, is rightly concerned about the pressures on women who pursue careers and motherhood together, often trying to postpone parenthood. She says the vast majority of young women do want to become mothers but that there are many reasons why they don’t have children at the time they want to. She is correct. The relentless passage of time, in reality, greatly limits the opportunity to choose parenthood. Yet despite all the pressures of liberal media, economic need and fashion, many people – both men and women – still rather like the idea of enjoying as much traditional family life as they can reasonably arrange. Many would probably have more children, sooner, if they could find the time and the money, but generally if you have the one, you cannot have the other. Some European countries are considerably more generous to young families, through their tax and benefits systems, than we are. Surely it would not be unconservative to wonder if we might move in this direction. Other problems – of good, reliable and affordable childcare, and of housing in a tough market – also need some attention. So it is a very good thing that Ms Cates is raising this problem. If the Tory Party is to regain its standing and its ability to win elections (which is an urgent task) it needs to offer a thoughtful and unwoke approach to social policy, rather than just follow in the footsteps of Blairism, as it has been all too ready to do. Perhaps there is a Conservative future after all. Article Name:Women should have babies before it’s too late, not be tricked into uselessly freezing their eggs Publication:The Mail on Sunday Author:By GLEN OWEN POLITICAL EDITOR Start Page:17 End Page:17")
Sunak plans more tax cuts [Bloomberg]
- With the country on its knees, Rishi Sunak is planning to offer even more tax cuts in a bid to avoid the inevitable election wipeout his party are facing. A significant reduction in income tax as well as a massive cut to stamp duty and council tax are said to be in the mix.
Reform UK partner with Northern Ireland’s TUV [BBC]
- To be honest, I am surprised it has taken the right wing parties in England this long to realise what fertile ground there is in Northern Ireland for their brand of conspiratorial racism and nationalism within parts of the loyalist community. If you’re outside of the north of Ireland, you probably don’t know who the TUV are so just think DUP but crazier with a leader in Jim Allister whose gammony head always looks like it is going to explode, no matter what the subject. He is a walking angry meme. The TUV are possibly even further to the right than Nigel Farage’s Reform.The TUV held their conference this weekend with Richard Tice, official leader of Reform in attendance along with fellow Reform member, Ben Habib. Peer Kate Hoey, another hateful being, was also in attendance.
Planet fitness stand by trans-supportive decision [Mail Online]
- Planet Fitness are facing an inevitable backlash from the cult after they banned a cis woman for videoing another woman in one of their changing rooms. The creep with the camera believed the other woman to be trans. In light of the backlash, Planet Fitness, unlike many others, have stood by their decision to be an inclusive company who will not tolerate perverts filming others in their changing rooms.
MEDIA & TODAY’S PAPERS
Media
Anti-trans Emma Barnett to leave Women’s Hour
- Emma Barnett is leaving Woman’s Hour to join Radio 4’s Today programme. The BBC is yet to announce her replacement, but Anita Rani, Katya Adler, Nuala McGovern and Tina Dahely are all being mentioned by the Daily Mail as possibilities. Barnett will join the Today programme from May.
Today’s papers
Daily Telegraph
- There were no anti-trans articles in The Daily Telegraph today, probably exhausted from the SIX they had on Sunday (more below).
Daily Mail
- Ministers plan to overhaul Equality Act
This is mostly based on The Sunday Telegraph’s reporting, which you can see below.
Weekend papers
Saturday Telegraph
- I use pressreader to check the papers. For some reason, the Saturday 16 March edition of The Telegraph was not available.
Sunday Telegraph
The Telegraph continue to help Kemi Badenoch and the cult push for a change to the Equality Act in order to remove trans people from the spaces we’ve been able to use all our lives, although they only ever mention trans women as if trans men don’t exist.
They also manage to get in a dig at Penny Mordaunt, who once supported trans people but threw us under the bus when she was running for Conservative Leader before she ultimately backed Liz Truss. They highlight her support but not her change of position. This bit of information being included makes sense when you remember that there was much chatter over the weekend that Mordaunt is considering challenging Rishi Sunak while The Telegraph would very much like to see Badenoch or Suella Braveman as the next leader.
Edward Malnick, writing the article, also refers to the ‘arcane parliamentary procedure’ Badenoch accused Labour of using to block Liz Truss’s bill. This procedure is so ‘arcane’ it was used just over two weeks ago by the Tories to run out time on the Conversion Therapy Bill.
The Telegraph weren’t done there, not by a long shot. After all, they still hadn’t quoted anyone from Sex Matters, yet. The same page carried three more anti-trans pieces:
The above article quotes Sex matters’ Fiona McAnena complaining that mentioning a trans kid attempting suicide is to “promote a suicide narrative in connection with gender distress”.
You’d think this would be enough for one day for any single paper, but not for The Telegraph. They still had room for one more on this page alone:
Fair Play for Women get a shout-out in this one after they reported nine different charities to the EHRC for daring to allow trans women to apply for jobs in women’s shelters. The pledge to overhaul the Equality Act is likely to be in the Conservative manifesto ahead of the general election.
All of these articles appeared on the same page:
Enough? Not for The Telegraph.
![How I took on the puberty-blocker orthodoxy – and won It’s a tribute to the importance of academic freedom that my research made such a difference The Sunday Telegraph17 Mar 2024MICHAEL BIGGS Last week, NHS England announced that puberty blockers would no longer be given to children at its gender-identity clinics. It’s been a long journey to get to this point. Almost exactly five years ago, The Telegraph broke the news that eventually led to the closure of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). The Tavistock started an experiment giving puberty blockers to adolescents as young as 12 in 2011. In 2018, when I started looking for outcomes, nothing had been published. This absence raised my suspicions, because I know that favourable results are speedily published. I searched for evidence using Freedom of Information requests and I made a formal complaint to the Health Research Authority. What I discovered was disturbing: conference presentations where the director of GIDS admitted that the results were not as they hoped; data from 30 of the patients after a year on puberty blockers showing more negative changes than positive ones. Submitting my findings to an academic journal would have been an uphill battle. The prevailing wisdom was that puberty blockers were lifesaving medication for “transgender kids”. Instead, I announced my findings on Transgender Trend, a blog run by Stephanie Davies-Arai, a critic of the medical is at ion of gender non conforming children, whose writing had helped to shift my views. This blog led to that first Telegraph article, my full-length paper on the experiment, and my appearance on BBC Newsnight. I was an expert witness in the judicial review brought by Keira Bell. Eventually, I did publish the outcomes of the experiment in a psychology journal, six months before their belated publication by the Tavistock’s clinicians. Would they have published without my discoveries? My extensive research was possible only because the University of Oxford paid my salary and the department of sociology let me pursue my curiosity without hindrance. Few academics in Britain enjoy such privilege, as bureaucratic managers exhort their underlings to maximise their consumption of external grant funding and their mass production of “outputs”. Naturally, these managers punish any line of research that strays from what is deemed orthodox by activist scholars and students, because dissenting research will not receive grants or achieve publication and will alienate fee-paying customers. Pursuing this research on puberty blockers entailed personal costs. Many colleagues warned me that I was being “very courageous”, a message familiar to viewers of Yes, Minister.I have surely made myself unappointable to any other post; I have lost students, invitations to seminars, and friends. But there is no need for another victim narrative. If you express unpopular views, you can hardly complain about being unpopular. As I pursued my investigation, the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences was given a grant of £700,000 to interview young people who identified as transgender, their parents, and gender clinicians. The project’s advisory board included a clinical psychologist at the Tavistock along with the co-founder of Gendered Intelligence, a transgender campaign group. Interviewees were recruited through organisations promoting endocrinological and surgical interventions. One was Mermaids. Another was GenderGP, a Singaporebased firm led by two British doctors; one has been struck off the medical register for dishonesty, while the other has a criminal conviction for running an unlicensed clinic. This project produced a website featuring videos of young people praising puberty blockers. These included testimonials recommending named private providers, including GenderGP. After complaints from me, these providers’ names disappeared from the website. Today, it still claims that “hormone blockers are a reversible intervention” and “it is more harmful to withhold this intervention that [sic] to provide it”. This project exemplifies what happens when universities and the NHS are yoked to campaigning organisations. It is fortunate that my university also provides space to lone academics to pursue lines of research that dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy – even beyond the confines of their discipline. Academic freedom comes at a price, of course. It enables scholars to pursue research that might seem frivolous. It protects weird cranks as well as truth-seekers. Only in retrospect, however, can they be distinguished. Academic freedom bestows a grave responsibility on those who enjoy its privilege: to pursue truth, even – or especially – when it offends our peers. Article Name:How I took on the puberty-blocker orthodoxy – and won Publication:The Sunday Telegraph Author:MICHAEL BIGGS Start Page:20 End Page:20](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5e455e9c-76e0-4fb3-9f80-ee1c86d60c44_1626x520.png "How I took on the puberty-blocker orthodoxy – and won It’s a tribute to the importance of academic freedom that my research made such a difference The Sunday Telegraph17 Mar 2024MICHAEL BIGGS Last week, NHS England announced that puberty blockers would no longer be given to children at its gender-identity clinics. It’s been a long journey to get to this point. Almost exactly five years ago, The Telegraph broke the news that eventually led to the closure of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). The Tavistock started an experiment giving puberty blockers to adolescents as young as 12 in 2011. In 2018, when I started looking for outcomes, nothing had been published. This absence raised my suspicions, because I know that favourable results are speedily published. I searched for evidence using Freedom of Information requests and I made a formal complaint to the Health Research Authority. What I discovered was disturbing: conference presentations where the director of GIDS admitted that the results were not as they hoped; data from 30 of the patients after a year on puberty blockers showing more negative changes than positive ones. Submitting my findings to an academic journal would have been an uphill battle. The prevailing wisdom was that puberty blockers were lifesaving medication for “transgender kids”. Instead, I announced my findings on Transgender Trend, a blog run by Stephanie Davies-Arai, a critic of the medical is at ion of gender non conforming children, whose writing had helped to shift my views. This blog led to that first Telegraph article, my full-length paper on the experiment, and my appearance on BBC Newsnight. I was an expert witness in the judicial review brought by Keira Bell. Eventually, I did publish the outcomes of the experiment in a psychology journal, six months before their belated publication by the Tavistock’s clinicians. Would they have published without my discoveries? My extensive research was possible only because the University of Oxford paid my salary and the department of sociology let me pursue my curiosity without hindrance. Few academics in Britain enjoy such privilege, as bureaucratic managers exhort their underlings to maximise their consumption of external grant funding and their mass production of “outputs”. Naturally, these managers punish any line of research that strays from what is deemed orthodox by activist scholars and students, because dissenting research will not receive grants or achieve publication and will alienate fee-paying customers. Pursuing this research on puberty blockers entailed personal costs. Many colleagues warned me that I was being “very courageous”, a message familiar to viewers of Yes, Minister.I have surely made myself unappointable to any other post; I have lost students, invitations to seminars, and friends. But there is no need for another victim narrative. If you express unpopular views, you can hardly complain about being unpopular. As I pursued my investigation, the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences was given a grant of £700,000 to interview young people who identified as transgender, their parents, and gender clinicians. The project’s advisory board included a clinical psychologist at the Tavistock along with the co-founder of Gendered Intelligence, a transgender campaign group. Interviewees were recruited through organisations promoting endocrinological and surgical interventions. One was Mermaids. Another was GenderGP, a Singaporebased firm led by two British doctors; one has been struck off the medical register for dishonesty, while the other has a criminal conviction for running an unlicensed clinic. This project produced a website featuring videos of young people praising puberty blockers. These included testimonials recommending named private providers, including GenderGP. After complaints from me, these providers’ names disappeared from the website. Today, it still claims that “hormone blockers are a reversible intervention” and “it is more harmful to withhold this intervention that [sic] to provide it”. This project exemplifies what happens when universities and the NHS are yoked to campaigning organisations. It is fortunate that my university also provides space to lone academics to pursue lines of research that dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy – even beyond the confines of their discipline. Academic freedom comes at a price, of course. It enables scholars to pursue research that might seem frivolous. It protects weird cranks as well as truth-seekers. Only in retrospect, however, can they be distinguished. Academic freedom bestows a grave responsibility on those who enjoy its privilege: to pursue truth, even – or especially – when it offends our peers. Article Name:How I took on the puberty-blocker orthodoxy – and won Publication:The Sunday Telegraph Author:MICHAEL BIGGS Start Page:20 End Page:20")
This one gives a shout-out to Transgender Trend.
How about another one?
Did you notice how many actual trans people were mentioned or involved in any of those articles?
Saturday Daily Mail
Mail on Sunday
Another day, another tribunal on the horizon. This child is supported by their parents, the child is supported by the school. The teacher raised a ‘safeguarding issue’ and now works in a sandwich shop where she says “we are more freely able to discuss these issues.” I bet her colleagues love that.
As usual, with these sorts of cases, there is more to it all than is being reported by the anti-trans press. In an interview with GB News, it was revealed that the church diocese agreed with Stonewall, the school tried to accommodate the teacher’s ‘views’ by placing the child in another class, and still the teacher refused to use the child’s chosen pronouns and name.
Saturday Guardian
![Remarkable result of invitation from Brianna’s mother The Guardian16 Mar 2024Helen Pidd North of England editor In an anonymous office in a Warrington business park, two mothers met last week for the first time. Esther Ghey and Emma Sutton sat down for what one restorative justice expert called the most “extraordinarily unusual” meeting he had heard of in 30 years. Ghey’s 16-year-old daughter, Brianna, was murdered in a nearby park last year by two teenagers, one of whom she thought was her friend. That was Scarlett Jenkinson, Sutton’s daughter, the “driving force” behind planning and executing the “exceptionally brutal” stabbing. Within 48 hours of Jenkinson being sentenced to a minimum of 22 years in prison last month, Ghey told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that she was open to meeting Sutton, insisting: “I don’t blame her for what her child has done.” Last week, it happened. There were no professional mediators present, just Tom Bedworth, a former journalist from the Warrington Guardian who had worked with Ghey on her Peace in Mind fundraising campaign, and Sutton’s brother, Rob. “It was a positive and respectful meeting,” Ghey revealed afterwards. She said they had discussed “the challenges of parenting” and that she would be willing to campaign with Sutton on the dangers for children of mobile phones and the internet. Prof Lawrence Sherman, one of the world’s leading experts in restorative justice, said of the meeting between Ghey and Sutton: “I’ve never heard of anything like that before. In 30 years, I have never heard a victim or survivor of crime offering through the media to have a meeting – and for that offer to be accepted so quickly. The fact they may even partner on these issues is even more remarkable.” If anyone can come close to understanding how Ghey might have felt in that meeting, it is Jo Berry. Her father, Sir Anthony Berry, was an MP who was killed in the IRA Brighton bombing during the 1984 Tory party conference, when she was 27. In November 2000 she set up a secret meeting in Dublin with Patrick Magee, the former IRA activist who planted the bomb. Magee – described by his trial judge as “a man of exceptional cruelty and inhumanity” – had been sentenced to 35 years’ jail but was released under the Good Friday Agreement after 13. When Berry and Magee met, he was still “the most demonised terrorist we had”, she said, and so she didn’t tell any of her friends and family where she was going. “I didn’t meet him for an apology. I didn’t meet him to change him. I just met him to see him as a human being,” she said. Magee began on the defensive. “He was quite political, defending his position. But I thought, I’m here now, I might as well tell him a bit about my dad and tell him about the impact on me,” she said. Then something switched: “He started seeing my dad as a human being for the first time. He changed. There was a tangible moment when his voice changed, his words changed, and so I stayed. This was more powerful than I could imagine. It was a much more restorative conversation, with him wanting to hear about my pain and my anger. He said he was disarmed by my empathy.” When Magee planted the bomb, he “dehumanised” his target, said Berry. “That’s often what happens when people use violence; they don’t see the humanity of the person, which is what allows them to do it. What often happens with restorative justice is that it rehumanises each side.” Both Berry and Magee’s lives changed indelibly that day and they began campaigning together on conflict resolution. She now works as a restorative justice practitioner and has facilitated dozens of conversations between victims and perpetrators, in Britain and abroad, in locations including Cyprus and Kosovo. From 2001 to 2006 Sherman and fellow researcher Heather Strang carried out a series of restorative justice experiments in Britain, focusing particularly on the crimes of burglary and robbery, and found “very strong benefits of reduced repeat offending and reduced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)”. Those who took part slept better, found it easier to return to work and ultimately will probably live longer, said Sherman. “People who suffer post-traumatic stress symptoms, whether that’s crime victims or combat veterans, have reduced life expectancy due to cardiovascular disease. We have demonstrated in our clinical trial that we can reduce post-traumatic stress, so it’s not too far a leap to say that [restorative justice] should be able to reduce mortality.” He said a study in Canberra, Australia, found the death rate from suicide among young violent offenders “who were prosecuted rather than being randomly assigned to restorative justice was 10% by 15 years later, compared to zero among those who did receive restorative justice by random assignment.” While contrition is essential for restorative justice, forgiveness is “not at all important” in the process, said Berry. “An awful lot of our victims say: ‘I don’t forgive them. But I was really glad to have their apology’,” said Sherman. Of course, not all victims want to meet those responsible for their pain, said Kenny Donaldson, the director of the Northern Ireland-based organisation SEFF, which supports more than 3,500 individual victims/survivors affected by terrorism and other Troubles-related criminal violence. Only in “the very rarest of circumstances”, such as Berry and Magee, “have the innocents of Troubles-related violence made arrangements to meet with the perpetrators of the violence perpetrated against them and/or their loved ones,” he said. For such meetings to take place, certain conditions must be in place, he said. An apology is not enough. “What is required is the recognition and acknowledgement from perpetrators that there was no justification for their actions, taken in many cases against their very own neighbours.” Article Name:Remarkable result of invitation from Brianna’s mother Publication:The Guardian Author:Helen Pidd North of England editor Start Page:11 End Page:11](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F148758a2-f2e0-429a-af6a-8c7e4681d993_578x729.png "Remarkable result of invitation from Brianna’s mother The Guardian16 Mar 2024Helen Pidd North of England editor In an anonymous office in a Warrington business park, two mothers met last week for the first time. Esther Ghey and Emma Sutton sat down for what one restorative justice expert called the most “extraordinarily unusual” meeting he had heard of in 30 years. Ghey’s 16-year-old daughter, Brianna, was murdered in a nearby park last year by two teenagers, one of whom she thought was her friend. That was Scarlett Jenkinson, Sutton’s daughter, the “driving force” behind planning and executing the “exceptionally brutal” stabbing. Within 48 hours of Jenkinson being sentenced to a minimum of 22 years in prison last month, Ghey told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that she was open to meeting Sutton, insisting: “I don’t blame her for what her child has done.” Last week, it happened. There were no professional mediators present, just Tom Bedworth, a former journalist from the Warrington Guardian who had worked with Ghey on her Peace in Mind fundraising campaign, and Sutton’s brother, Rob. “It was a positive and respectful meeting,” Ghey revealed afterwards. She said they had discussed “the challenges of parenting” and that she would be willing to campaign with Sutton on the dangers for children of mobile phones and the internet. Prof Lawrence Sherman, one of the world’s leading experts in restorative justice, said of the meeting between Ghey and Sutton: “I’ve never heard of anything like that before. In 30 years, I have never heard a victim or survivor of crime offering through the media to have a meeting – and for that offer to be accepted so quickly. The fact they may even partner on these issues is even more remarkable.” If anyone can come close to understanding how Ghey might have felt in that meeting, it is Jo Berry. Her father, Sir Anthony Berry, was an MP who was killed in the IRA Brighton bombing during the 1984 Tory party conference, when she was 27. In November 2000 she set up a secret meeting in Dublin with Patrick Magee, the former IRA activist who planted the bomb. Magee – described by his trial judge as “a man of exceptional cruelty and inhumanity” – had been sentenced to 35 years’ jail but was released under the Good Friday Agreement after 13. When Berry and Magee met, he was still “the most demonised terrorist we had”, she said, and so she didn’t tell any of her friends and family where she was going. “I didn’t meet him for an apology. I didn’t meet him to change him. I just met him to see him as a human being,” she said. Magee began on the defensive. “He was quite political, defending his position. But I thought, I’m here now, I might as well tell him a bit about my dad and tell him about the impact on me,” she said. Then something switched: “He started seeing my dad as a human being for the first time. He changed. There was a tangible moment when his voice changed, his words changed, and so I stayed. This was more powerful than I could imagine. It was a much more restorative conversation, with him wanting to hear about my pain and my anger. He said he was disarmed by my empathy.” When Magee planted the bomb, he “dehumanised” his target, said Berry. “That’s often what happens when people use violence; they don’t see the humanity of the person, which is what allows them to do it. What often happens with restorative justice is that it rehumanises each side.” Both Berry and Magee’s lives changed indelibly that day and they began campaigning together on conflict resolution. She now works as a restorative justice practitioner and has facilitated dozens of conversations between victims and perpetrators, in Britain and abroad, in locations including Cyprus and Kosovo. From 2001 to 2006 Sherman and fellow researcher Heather Strang carried out a series of restorative justice experiments in Britain, focusing particularly on the crimes of burglary and robbery, and found “very strong benefits of reduced repeat offending and reduced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)”. Those who took part slept better, found it easier to return to work and ultimately will probably live longer, said Sherman. “People who suffer post-traumatic stress symptoms, whether that’s crime victims or combat veterans, have reduced life expectancy due to cardiovascular disease. We have demonstrated in our clinical trial that we can reduce post-traumatic stress, so it’s not too far a leap to say that [restorative justice] should be able to reduce mortality.” He said a study in Canberra, Australia, found the death rate from suicide among young violent offenders “who were prosecuted rather than being randomly assigned to restorative justice was 10% by 15 years later, compared to zero among those who did receive restorative justice by random assignment.” While contrition is essential for restorative justice, forgiveness is “not at all important” in the process, said Berry. “An awful lot of our victims say: ‘I don’t forgive them. But I was really glad to have their apology’,” said Sherman. Of course, not all victims want to meet those responsible for their pain, said Kenny Donaldson, the director of the Northern Ireland-based organisation SEFF, which supports more than 3,500 individual victims/survivors affected by terrorism and other Troubles-related criminal violence. Only in “the very rarest of circumstances”, such as Berry and Magee, “have the innocents of Troubles-related violence made arrangements to meet with the perpetrators of the violence perpetrated against them and/or their loved ones,” he said. For such meetings to take place, certain conditions must be in place, he said. An apology is not enough. “What is required is the recognition and acknowledgement from perpetrators that there was no justification for their actions, taken in many cases against their very own neighbours.” Article Name:Remarkable result of invitation from Brianna’s mother Publication:The Guardian Author:Helen Pidd North of England editor Start Page:11 End Page:11")
- Esther Ghey met Emma Sutton, mother of her daughter Brianna’s murderer, to discuss challenges and potential collaboration, emphasising healing and reconciliation. No mediators were present when the pair met.
Do not be misled by the headline. This article does not, in fact, explain why they are being stopped. It offers not a single word about the attack on trans rights from the government, which is the only reason this is happening. That isn’t really a surprise given how much help The Guardian have given them.
The Observer
- Sonia Sodha did not reproduce her one column this weekend.
HOUSE OF COMMONS
- The Commons will consider the 10 amendments suggested by the House of Lords to the safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
WESTMINSTER HALL
- 4.30pm – MPs will debate two opposing petitions relating to LGBT content in relationships education. One wants to keep it included, the other wants to be an arse about the whole thing.
HOUSE OF LORDS
AROUND THE WORLD
Teen charged with murder after fatal shooting of trans woman Ashia Davis during Pride month [Pink News] [FOX 2 DETROIT]
Kentucky GOP moves to criminalise interference with legislature after transgender protests [The Hamilton Spectator]
- Kentucky‘s GOP-dominated legislature is advancing legislation to criminalise ‘disruptive’ protests in the Capitol, after anti-transgender legislation protests. Advocates fear it could undermine the right to protest, chilling public dissent. The bill, pending Senate approval, would make such disruptions misdemeanors or felonies, depending on the offence. Critics argue this could infringe on free speech rights.
Jersey City Resolution celebrates March 31 as Transgender Day Of Visibility [Tap into Jersey City]
- Jersey City‘s resolution designates March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility, unanimously approved by the Municipal Council. The 15th annual event will be marked by a flag-raising ceremony and a comprehensive social media campaign. These efforts aim to celebrate trans people, promote inclusion, and highlight ongoing discrimination challenges.
Elliot Page wants to combat the ‘endless, full-blown lies’ about trans lives [Pink News]
Ron DeSantis accuses Libs of TikTok of ‘lying’ for clicks [Pink News]
- When two of the worst people you know fight…
ANY OTHER BUSINESS
Import tariffs on many goods suspended
- UK import tariffs on goods including flowers, fruit juices and chemicals are to be suspended for two years, the government announced ahead of a conference for small businesses as Kemi Badenoch and the government continue to struggle with Brexit.
Teen arrested over alleged hate crime on Black pupil [Sunday Telegraph]
- A teenager has been arrested over an alleged hate crime on a Black schoolboy in Carlisle. Footage on social media appeared to show a student being punched and pushed and made to kiss a white boy’s shoe.
Trump trials delayed
- Trump‘s legal challenges in Georgia and New York were delayed but could still go to trial before the election. He is also facing a significant cash shortfall compared with Joe Biden and is asking some donors to increase their contributions.
Democratic infighting [Politico]
- Senator Chuck Schumer‘s criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has created tension between AIPAC and some Democrats.
The Biden administration is using ankle monitors to track some migrant families [NY Times]
Vladimir Putin’s reign to continue, nobody surprised
- Vladimir Putin has been returned as the unsurprising ‘winner’ of Russia’s sham election with ‘88%’ of the ‘vote’.
COMING UP
710th Meeting, 30th Session, Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) [UN]
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland faces a grilling.
TRANSWRITES YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
- Why are people accusing JK Rowling of Holocaust denial? By Gemma Stone.
- What does Liz Truss’s anti-trans bill actually say? By Lee Hurley.
- Understanding the “WPATH Files” debate, by Lee Hurley.
- JK Rowling will be arrested, finally, by Gemma Stone.
- Sex Matters Director Helen Joyce reads porn of teenagers for “research”, by Gemma Stone.
RECOMMENDED READING
Lesbian couple loses dream wedding, neighbours rain down love [Medium]
- Even in the heart of the Bible Belt, the public are standing up for queer people.
RECOMMENDED WATCHING
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