This is a book I shared with my parents when I came out to them at the age of 17. We’re constantly told being trans today is like being gay in the 80s/90s. I’d like to share some advice from the book. How similar is this is to what the LGBTQ+ sector says to today’s teens? …🧵

Tell me this is not real. Please.

It’s not opaque at all. Gay rights do not require sterilising children, removing healthy body parts, ending single-sex spaces, allowing men into women’s sports, or demanding that we subvert the meaning of everyday language. The trans rights movement jumped the shark, and the BBC would be very sensible to move towards a more impartial and truth-based position on these contested and controversial political issues.

Three times recently, in different places, I’ve asked staff in shops if there is a letter box nearby. I’ve said “letter box”, “pillar box”, “a red box for putting letters in”, “somewhere to post letters”. Every time they’ve had no idea what I am talking about. Two of the three times, I couldn’t even get the person to acknowledge they understood what I was referring to…the closest term they seemed to recognise was “post office”. I feel very old. And doesn’t everyone need to post things sometimes? 🤷🏻

We have to move away from all of the social norms and rules in relation to single-sex sports, services and spaces because some men might self-exclude if we don’t pretend they are women. It’s a really quite impressive trick that trans rights activism has pulled - making the constant affirmation of subjective identity seem so fundamental that it overrides all sex-based protections. True participation, true inclusion and true equality would be seeing trans-identified men being fully included as men. This would widen the bandwidth of what it means to be a man. It would mean we are properly including all men - including feminine and feminised men - on equal terms. It would be truly progressive and challenging of gender stereotypes. But trans-identified people don’t want proper inclusion or participation on equal terms; they want the special treatment of being able to access the rights of a group that is not their own. Rights should always be afforded to people based on who they are, not on the basis of who they want to be seen as. Every other rights movement in history has operated on the basis of demanding rights based on who people are. No other rights movement has ever demanded people should have access to the rights of a group that is not their own, based on some entirely subjective inner feeling of who they would rather be.

"Iran uses gender conversion to erase gays & lesbians." Yes, it does. And, given we have evidence that the majority (80-90%) of the children in the UK who have been treated for gender dysphoria (often using the same chemical castration drug that was Alan Turing was forced to take) were same-sex attracted, why is this also not the erasure of gays and lesbians? Blimey, come on. Join up the blooming dots. The safety of children should not be waiting for you to slowly - so very, very slowly - come to the understanding that you are bound, eventually, to land on.

Overall, I am pleased not to be a service director at King's College London any more. The more I hear about the place, the more lost it seems. (The puberty blocker trial is a particular low point, in my view.) The only occasions on which part of me wonders if it would have been good to stay on at KCL are when I imagine what it would have been like to join together with other sensible colleagues - like the people behind this event tonight - to try to turn the tanker around.

My 9. my9albums.com/s/wtyzLC29f8

The conversion practices legislation being considered by the @niassembly and by @10DowningStreet is the naked emperor claiming that the little boy pointing his finger at the truth is the real danger and criminalising him. The legislation is about making sure the emperor continues to be affirmed as 'clothed' and is allowed to remain naked in public. Both bills will, quite literally, criminalise speaking truth to power. A more dystopian end to the fairy tale is difficult to imagine.

Unbearably patronising. She's talking to gay people, ffs, lecturing them about their own community. I was almost selected to go into the Big Brother house (I got down to the last 20 or so applicants) - although we are talking about a long time ago...an early BB series. Very rarely since then have I ever wished that I had made it into the house. However, I would have loved to have been there for this particular conversation, be able to respond to her puffed-up, rescuer nonsense, and challenge her on her inability to answer straightforward questions about women's sport and single-sex toilets.

This just sounds like a parliamentary party that knows its broader membership has lost the plot but has no idea what to do about it. Modern progressivism backs everyone - including its own - into corners and leaves the more sane people hoping, desperately, that some broad platitudes will cut it, even though they know full well that broad platitudes won’t come close to cutting it. Modern progressivism is crazy-making.

Joseph - @McInurface - blocked me after I asked him this question. So far, so dull. But what did make me laugh was the National Geographic article he linked to, instead of answering my question. archive.is/20241115023011/ht… It’s an article from a few years ago which claims to describe how historians are mapping out the lives of transgender people. It mentions some male priests who worshipped goddesses, a very dubious account of Emperor Elagabalus, a woman who pretended to be a man to serve in the US Civil War and then there’s a jump to Einar Wegener and George Jorgensen. It is a complete blurring of transgenderism and gender non-conformity and acting as the opposite sex to overcome sexist barriers - as though these three things are the same. The question, “In what sense have trans people existed for centuries?” is not answered with a handful of dubious, gender non-conforming individuals, and then a whole lot of medicalisation from the 1950s onwards. That only takes transgenderism back to the 1950s. Trans - in the sense of people believing, and/or wanting to compel others to accept, that they have a brain that is the opposite sex to their body - is not centuries old. Neither is the medicalisation of this notion. And trans and gender non-conformity are not the same thing or usefully conflated - unless your purpose is obfuscation. Thanks for the ‘reply and block’, Joseph, but my question sits there waiting for proper engagement.

A thought I keep returning to is that the reality-denialism of transgenderism is just a symptom of a much bigger set of societal problems. Our attachment to a selfish, distorted notion of ‘bodily autonomy’, the idea that people who disagree with our viewpoint are evil people, the societal incentives to medicalise everything, the lack of social cohesion, a lack of purpose, an increasingly disembodied existence - transgenderism is just one manifestation of these things. We can seek to put boundaries around transgenderism, as well we should, but these societal ills will keep resurfacing in different forms - surrogacy, assisted death, transhumanism, seeing ‘sex work’ as work, our pornified society, falling birth rates, the increased medicalisation of mental health going hand in hand with mental health outcomes getting worse, etc., etc. They are all symptoms of the same fundamental problems. And new manifestations will emerge. It’s a depressing thought - it undermines the hope I normally feel for the future - but I can’t shake it.

Only just listened to this new episode on the dog walk this morning. I have missed old-style Heterodorx during the Cori hiatus. (And, picking up on part of the conversation in this episode, I would very much like to hear Cori and Nina talking to someone at @genspect about REPATH - because, right now, I am persuaded by both of their, seemingly incompatible, positions. I can either try to work that tension through in my own mind or I can request a Heterodorx episode to accelerate and shape my thinking for me. The latter option would be easier to fit into my week.)

Spot on. This Bill is the ultimate example of do-goodery and meddling, pushed largely by people with no real insight or experience but a big desire to look good themselves. If politicians really considered how this legislation would play out in a family context in which a child has gone down the rabbit hole of starting to reject their sex (and if politicians really understood that any child can be encouraged by others to reject their sex; gender dysphoria is not contained to a particular group of children), they would do everything they could do to get this legislation thrown out.

Reading through this thread - Jennifer Melle giving evidence in the Peggie case against the Royal College of Nursing - the thought I keep having is just how high-profile Melle’s case was. It beggars belief, when a nurse is on the front page of newspapers with an employment-related issue, that the union the nurse is a member of would behave in this way. There would seem to have been no sense of urgency on the part of the RCN and no clear follow-through, and Melle’s case was passed from one person at RCN to another. A high-profile case like this is when a union should be at its most engaged and proactive. A case like this is a golden opportunity for a union to profile the benefits of union membership and of union advocacy. The fact that the RCN seems to have done everything possible in Melle’s case to avoid engaging in proper advocacy on her behalf sure seems like a course of action with an ideological motivation to me.

As a society, we medicalised - with puberty suppressants, hormones and surgeries - people’s attractions towards, and reactions against, sex stereotypes. We actually did that. It is absolutely bonkers.