Category: Transgender
Children who identify as transgender have been let down badly by an NHS that succumbed to an activist lobby.
That is the obvious conclusion to make after Dr Hilary Cass published her final report this morning* as part of the Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People.
This piece is an extract from my book, Transsexual Apostate published by Spiked
What drives a man to want to become a woman? To answer this question, it’s worth looking back to the work of American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard. In the 1980s, while working at the Toronto Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, he developed a somewhat controversial taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism (1). He described one group simply as ‘homosexual transsexuals’ (HSTS). But it is his second group that interests me personally, because it encompasses my own experience as a male-to-female transsexual. A group needs a name – where would the transgender world be without labels? – and, in 1989, Blanchard coined the term ‘autogynephilia’ (2).
The Council of Europe might claim to be focussed on human rights, democracy and the rule of law, but lately the Strasbourg-based human rights organisation has been championing a new cause: the propagation of gender identity ideology. A paper released earlier this month by the Council’s Commissioner for Human Rights should ring alarm bells across the continent. Human Rights and Gender Identity and Expression pulls no punches. The key recommendations are alarming, for example:
Kevin Lister has lost his case at an employment tribunal in Bristol. I am not surprised. The former maths teacher was dismissed by New College Swindon for gross misconduct in September 2022 after he failed to refer to one of his students by their preferred name or pronoun.
Children in England will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at NHS gender identity clinics. This is good news: it was never appropriate to halt the normal physical development of young people struggling with the concept of growing up into the men and women that nature intended.
The BBC has upheld a ludicrous complaint against the Today programme’s Justin Webb. Back in August, Webb told listeners that trans women were ‘in other words, males’. This basic truth should not be controversial. We transwomen are male. It is a necessary criterion – women cannot be transwomen because women are female.
A transgender judge has resigned, apparently because of the risk of politicising the judiciary. But this was no ordinary judge. Victoria McCloud is a King’s Bench Master of the High Court, a senior job. In 2010, McCloud – then aged 40 – was the youngest person to have been appointed to the role. The news was not trumpeted at the time as a ‘first’ for transgender people. Few people knew about McCloud’s unusual history and, it seemed, fewer cared.
The Parkrun saga over times for transgender runners staggers on, but the organisation has only itself to blame. For want of a clear policy on sex and gender, Parkrun seems to have upset everyone. Last week, at least one event director quit as the company erased its run records wholesale in what looked like a knee-jerk reaction to a campaign against Parkrun’s view that competitors could self-declare their gender.
The Scottish government is once again champing at the bit to satisfy the LGBTQI+ lobby. Holyrood’s grandiose plans for sex self-ID might finally have hit the buffers, but the voters need to keep a close eye on what is coming in its wake.
Debbie Hayton 