Amyah

No one's a no one. Women like you have had my back in the last five years. Messages like yours have made all the difference when things have seemed a bit bleak. A huge part of my anger around this issue is that a lot of very privileged, lanyard-class people have attempted (and often succeeded) in imposing an ideology across our institutions for which poorer women (and gay men, lesbians and the disabled) are paying the heaviest price. That's why those who can afford to stand up need to do it.

Utter garbage. The reason gold standard organisations like Amnesty International now have to run scared from wafer-thin hate groups like Sex Matters and LGB Alliance is because UK law has been corrupted. Reputable international bodies now face ruin in the UK for telling the obvious truth: That all the single-issue “women’s rights” groups that suddenly sprouted after 2017 are actually trans hate fronts funded by super-wealthy highly litigious bigots.

Translation: oops, didn’t realise people outside our ideological bubble are THIS pissed off about the loss of sex-based rights. We remain implacably opposed to any organisation fighting to retain them, but shove in the words ‘rights of women’ to keep the bigots happy.

Here’s what she wrote about it to parliamentarians: “There was considerable discomfort in the House and more widely on social media about my account of ‘Jo’, a biologically male child who was socially transitioned to a girl at 2½ and presented at around 10-11 afraid to go to secondary school for fear of being ‘outed’, later retreating to their bedroom and developing weak bones due to inactivity. ‘Jo’ is not a specific case, but represents a group of similar children being seen in the new services, and previously at the Tavistock. Although social transition is usually later (from 4 onwards), I was told during the Review about children who had been transitioned at Jo’s age and younger. “I have been asked why safeguarding procedures would not have been initiated when ‘Jo’ was a toddler, but these children are frequently living in stealth (i.e. those around them do not know their biological sex) and do not come to medical attention until much later as puberty looms. A male child who has socially transitioned at 4 and presents at 11 will have next to no recollection of being a boy. They are not making a decision to be a girl – by that time they just believe themselves to be a girl and have no frame of reference to think differently. Even with input from the very skilled therapists in the new services, encouraging them to think more flexibly about their identity is rarely successful, regardless of what their natural trajectory would have been if they had not been socially transitioned at that very early stage.”

What other things abusive parents do to children at an age before they can tell they're wrong should we just go along with, on the basis that it's devastating to a child's sense of self to learn the truth?