In April 2021, Schlegel won the seat [in Louisiana’s House of Representatives] with 52 percent of the vote, and immediately planned to address the usual concerns of the 45,000 residents in her district, such as crime and education. But a few months after she took office in May 2021, she decided on a different agenda: taking on online porn.

What she has since achieved—after two years in office—has made international news. Not only has Schlegel curbed the billion-dollar online porn industry for the first time in history, forcing websites to protect kids in Louisiana and pull out of at least three U.S. states, she has offered a legislative blueprint for others across the country.

“I am truly humbled to see that we began a movement that has swept the country and began a long overdue conversation about how we can protect kids from hardcore pornography,” she says.

Schlegel’s crusade started back in December 2021. She had listened to The Howard Stern Show and 21-year-old pop sensation Billie Eilish talking about online porn. Eilish told Stern that she began watching “abusive” images at the age of 11, and that this had warped her sense of how to behave during sex and what women’s bodies look like.

“No vagina looks like this,” Eilish told Stern. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

Schlegel was struck by Eilish’s openness, that she was “just a young girl being vulnerable enough to share those details with the world.”

The singer’s story also chimed with Schlegel’s professional experience both as a sex addiction therapist and a court-appointed special advocate for abused and neglected children in the foster care system. She knew the issues facing young clients raised on unlimited free online porn—the decoupling of intimacy from sex; the inability to get aroused without porn playing in the background; a warped idea of what your partner actually wants.

“If you’ve never had your first kiss but you’ve seen hardcore pornography, it’s going to mold the way you view sexuality,”

Schlegel said. “You’re not dealing with a fully formed adult brain that’s like, ‘Oh, so I shouldn’t strangle my partner?’ ”

If Schlegel understood the damage pornography causes, she also knew how easy it is for children to access it. And she realized that now she was a state legislator, she was uniquely positioned to do something about it.

She soon settled on the idea of legislation that, if passed, would require porn sites to confirm their customers were 18 or older before they could click through to their content.

“You can’t be 10 years old and go into Mr. Binky’s—that’s an adult bookstore in my district,” she says. “This is public policy we’ve accepted across the board in brick-and-mortar stores, but we’ve just been giving a pass to the internet.”

[…]

Meanwhile, Schlegel began researching legal precedent. She was looking for a sweet spot where a law would limit minors’ access to pornography without being struck down as unconstitutional. She says she got in touch “with constitutional lawyers, people who can take a look at my ideas and the language and ask, ‘Could this pass constitutional muster?’ ”

There was also the technical question of how exactly to verify someone’s age online. During the pandemic, an electronic age verification system, called LA Wallet, had been authorized to accept digital driver’s licenses and ID cards as legitimate forms of identification in Louisiana. After getting assurances that LA Wallet could provide the technology to “verify someone’s age without giving any other identifying information,” Schlegel crafted Louisiana House Bill 142.

The legislation requires online publishers of porn sites to require age verification, via an LA Wallet program called VerifyYou Pro, Anonymous edition, that users are over 18.

By February, Schlegel had introduced the legislation in the lower chamber. HB-142 sailed through the Louisiana House (96–1) and State Senate (34–0) in June 2022. And when the law went into effect this past January, Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site, lost 80 percent of its traffic in Louisiana.

Soon after, two dozen states proposed copycat policies; Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas have now all passed similar legislation. This summer, Pornhub chose to pull out of Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia entirely rather than comply with the new age verification requirements.

Full article here

The Russell Brand saga has transported me back to his Noughties heyday, when newly launched lads’ mags Nuts and Zoo had taken porn from the top shelf to right beside the till, with “win a boob job for your girlfriend” and how to break down her objections to anal sex.

At the Edinburgh Fringe I sat through endless male stand-ups making jokes such as Jimmy Carr’s classic: “Q: What do nine out of ten people enjoy? A: Gang rape.” Meanwhile 300 lap-dancing clubs had popped up on high streets across the land because in 2003 the Labour government loosened licensing laws.

Objecting to all this was bitterly hard: you’d be labelled a humourless prude or compared to the Viz character Millie Tant. Lighten up, babe, it’s just a bit of fun! A lads’ mag editor, a lifelong leftie, accused me of “imposing outmoded sexual politics on a world that doesn’t fit any more”.

Labour politicians looked puzzled when I asked why they’d pimped the sex industry into horrified communities. When I asked Carr in a 2011 interview if he liked rape gags, he replied: “I like the ones I write.”

Into that vacuum roared Russell Brand. And, of course, right-wing tabloids, misogynist men’s mags and TV executives adored and enabled him: he made headlines, and a lot of people a lot of money.

What shocked me most about Noughties culture was the silence of the left. Far from denouncing lads’ mags, a new “sex positive” feminism emerged that internalised their values. It saw the rapacious sex industry as empowering and pandered to the unbound desires of men like Brand.

Then Brand discovered that spouting Thomas Piketty pieties gained him even wider adulation. He was crowned, in George Monbiot of The Guardian’s words, “the best thing that’s happened to the left for years”. Woke bros — who had always dismissed feminism as a middle-class distraction from class politics or a brake on their own personal pleasures — saw nothing to dislike in him. Not his lurid 2007 memoir in which he spat in a woman’s face, mistreated prostitutes and hinted at even worse, nor his misogynist stand-up material.

When he and Jonathan Ross humiliated Andrew Sachs’s granddaughter Georgina Baillie again, live on air, Marina Hyde, of The Guardian, dismissed it as a confected Daily Mail outrage and said Baillie, who was merely seeking an apology, should stop droning on. (Hyde apologised this week.)

Her reaction epitomises the hard left’s noxious goodies v baddies mindset: Brand was The Guardian’s guy (thus excused censorship) so his victim therefore must be a right-wing stooge. Brand’s misdeeds were public, his lecherous sexism around female staff discomforting, dark rumours were starting to fly.

Yet fame thinly gilded with socialism gave him a seat next to the editor Alan Rusbridger at a Guardian news conference, top billing at its public events, a regular column, star-struck bro hugs from Owen Jones and obsequious blurbs for his books.

The merest whisper of racism or homophobia and Brand would have been shunned. But he was only offensive about women, so wilful blindness melded with political expediency and those who pride themselves in defending the vulnerable gave a cunning abuser a free pass.

The other lesson from this affair is one I’ve practised my whole life: never trust messianic men. (Nor women, although these are rarer.)

If a guy claims to have all the answers, if he cares more about the sound of his own voice than the cause he espouses, if he acts like normal niceties (personal hygiene, table manners, saying thank you) are only for the little people, if he speaks of himself in the third person, has an elaborate wellness routine, a beard and/or man-bun, wears thumb rings, cowboy boots or (biggest of all red flags) a hat indoors, stand well back.

It will save you not only from bad boyfriends and the thrall of cult leaders but the false prophets of Julian Assange, Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Tate and Russell Brand.

Peers have passed a controversial new law aimed at making social media firms more responsible for users' safety on their platforms.

The Online Safety Bill has taken years to agree and will force firms to remove illegal content and protect children from some legal but harmful material.

Children's charity the NSPCC said the law would mean a safer online world.

But critics argued it would allow a regulator, and tech firms to dictate what may or may not be said online.

The nearly 300-page bill will also introduce new rules such as requiring pornography sites to stop children viewing content by checking the ages of users.

While the act is often spoken about as a tool for reining in Big Tech, government figures have suggested more than 20,000 small businesses will also have to comply.

Platforms will also need to show they are committed to removing illegal content including:

New offences have also been included in the bill, including cyber-flashing and the sharing of "deepfake" pornography.

And the bill includes measures to make it easier for bereaved parents to obtain information about their children from tech firms.

The technology secretary Michelle Donelan told the BBC the bill was "extremely comprehensive".

Asked when there would be evidence of tech firms changing their behaviour she said: "We've already started to see that change in behaviour happening.

"As soon as this bill gains Royal Assent, the regulator will be working even more hand in hand with those social media platforms and you'll see them changing the way that they're operating", she added.

(Full article here)

Last week, Arkansas became the latest US state to introduce age verification checks for adult websites. Pornhub, the world’s largest porn site with over 115 million visits a day, retaliated by blocking all traffic from IP addresses in the state in protest. It has also done the same in Utah, Mississippi, Virginia and Texas — all of which have enacted similar policies — while in Louisiana, traffic on the site has fallen by 80% since age verification checks were introduced earlier this year. Montana is following suit in January 2024, with dozens of other copycat bills also being debated.

The UK is increasingly looking like an outlier in not enacting age verification legislation for adult content. From Canada to Australia to South Korea, more and more countries are putting pressure on the porn industry to make sure they restrict access to underage users. Earlier this year France introduced “digital certificates” for people to prove their age online; any porn website that does not comply risks being shut down or fined. These are now being extended to social media websites with an age limit of 15, unless minors can prove they have authorisation from their parents. Last year Germany’s biggest porn site, xHamster, was banned for refusing to verify the age of its users, while a judge in the Netherlands has ruled that the site must remove all its amateur videos unless it can demonstrate that everyone has consented. 

By contrast, the UK’s policies towards the porn industry are not just laissez-faire but non-existent. Revenge porn has been a sexual offence since 2015, and the Domestic Abuse Bill recently made even threatening to share sexual images illegal. However, in 2023 there are still no legal frameworks in place to stop children watching porn. Any child with an internet connection in the UK simply needs to click a box saying they are 18 and suddenly they have access to “adult” entertainment — the clue is in the name. 

Ironically, the UK was actually the first country to pass a law containing a legal mandate for an online age verification system with the 2017 Digital Economy Act. Yet, after various setbacks, these plans were dropped in 2019, on account of technical difficulties and concerns from privacy campaigners. Last year, the Government revived the proposal as part of the Online Safety Bill, and in February 43 MPs wrote to the Culture Secretary to ask for this to be formally incorporated into the Bill — yet there has been no further clarity over how and when any age verification systems may come into place. In England the average age children first see pornography is 13, with nearly 80% viewing violent pornography before they are 18. One in 10 have watched it by the time they are 9 years old.

It’s telling that the Government is quick to crack down on underage vaping — a relatively new fad — but so slow to deal with something that has been proven, time and time again, to be far more dangerous. Of course there are security and privacy questions, but the fact that Pornhub would sooner stop doing business altogether than verify that its users aren’t children gives a pretty telling insight into the morality of the pornography industry. Some may argue that teenagers will get around these blocks by using VPNs to change their location, but that often requires payment. Besides, the goal is not to make access impossible but, rather, more difficult, and this will be even more effective if we have more international uniformity.

Pornhub promotes itself as the poster child for internet freedom, and the age verification debate as a binary choice between protecting one’s privacy and succumbing to a surveillance state. Ultimately, though, this is about child safeguarding, and the sooner the UK catches up the better.

An academic has withdrawn her forthcoming book from Oxford University Press and accused the publisher of helping to launder “genocidal fascism” against trans people as apolitical philosophies.

The publisher defended its right to publish works on “a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints” after Eugenia Zuroski, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada, attacked it and withdrew her book on 18th-century humour.

In a blog post, she claimed the decision by the OUP to publish a second book by Holly Lawford-Smith, a gender-critical feminist from Australia, had contributed to a genocidal agenda, and that the publisher was helping to launder “transphobia”.

Zuroski claimed the OUP was publishing “hateful rhetoric while waves of anti-trans legislation are being drafted and passed in both the US and the UK, making life increasingly unlivable for trans people day by day”.

She wrote: “Honestly, it makes me sick. I cannot stomach the thought of allowing my own labours to feed a press willing to lend its reputation to ‘gender critical’ fascism.” She also pointed to research by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, an American charity, which claimed the gender-critical movement “advanced a genocidal agenda through tactics that include laundering fascist ideas as apolitical ‘philosophies’”, adding: “OUP’s publication of this kind of material therefore directly contributes to this agenda by granting it scholarly credibility.”

Lawford-Smith, an associate professor in political philosophy at Melbourne University, hit back, saying: “Obviously, almost none of what Eugenia says is true”. She described her comments as the “familiar sort of ludicrous hyperbole coming from trans activists”.

She said: “Oxford University Press must not let a small group of zealots control its processes. Freedom of inquiry is of paramount importance and should be protected at all costs, whether the threat to it comes dressed up in social justice costume or otherwise. The idea that feminism about females could be fairly characterised as either genocidal or fascist is just absurd.”

The row started last year when OUP published Lawford-Smith’s first book, Gender-Critical Feminism, which sought to “defend gender-critical feminism, a theory and movement that reclaims the sex/gender distinction” and insists upon the reality and importance of sex.

Proponents of gender-critical feminism, also known by opponents as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, believe biological sex should be prized above gender identity, and therefore trans women are not women.

The publication led to 800 authors writing an open letter to express profound disappointment at OUP’s decision, calling Lawford-Smith a high-profile anti-trans-rights activist, whose “academic credentials have been thoroughly eclipsed by her public mobilisation of transphobic rhetoric”.

They claimed the author had, in interviews posted on her website, described trangender women as men, dismissed the transgender population as “fashionable” and supported conversion therapy. The title of her book, the letter said, was an anti-trans dog whistle that was designed to sound academic. The UK, it added, “is known globally as an epicentre of anti-transgender policy and rhetoric”.

Lawford-Smith denied the claims, but said as a feminist she opposed trans women having women’s rights, such as access to women’s prisons or changing rooms.

OUP responded to the open letter in April last year, saying Lawford-Smith’s book offered a serious and rigorous academic representation of this school of feminist thought, and that it had published other titles on topics such as transgender rights and tackling prejudice, to further contribute to academic debate.

It was news that a second book, Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, would be published which led Zuroski to withdraw her forthcoming title, A Funny Thing: the Undisciplined Eighteenth Century.

She said the boycott was “very necessary”.

Others have since followed suit. Natalia Cecire, a senior lecturer in English and American literature at Sussex University, tweeted: “I have peer reviewed for OUP in the past, which won’t be happening again. I have no desire to be involved in the work of laundering transphobia, which is what they are now doing.”

A spokeswoman for OUP said: “We can confirm we are no longer publishing A Funny Thing: The Undisciplined Eighteenth Century. As a scholarly publisher, we publish a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints across many fields of scholarship.”

"An alleged sexual abuse victim’s successful defence against a defamation claim could set an important precedent, lawyers say"

A landmark ruling where an alleged sexual abuse victim successfully defended a libel claim does not give carte blanche for survivors to name perpetrators, lawyers argue.

Nina Cresswell, 33, claimed that she had been sexually assaulted by a tattooist, Billy “the bastard” Hay, at a nightclub in Sunderland in 2010 when she was a 20-year-old student.

She reported an attempted rape to Northumbria police immediately after the alleged assault, but within hours officers decided that her complaint would not be treated as a crime.

A decade later, when the #TattooMeToo campaign was exposing the prevalence of sexual abuse in the tattoo industry, Cresswell publicly named Hay as her attacker in a blog, an email and social media posts to alert other women about his behaviour towards her.

Hay sued for libel, claiming that her defamatory publications had caused serious harm to his reputation and resulted in him losing work

Cresswell relied on the defences of truth and public interest, set out in the Defamation Act 2013. After a four-day trial at the High Court in London, Mrs Justice Heather Williams ruled that Cresswell’s allegation that Hay had violently sexually assaulted her was “substantially true on the balance of probabilities” — the civil law standard of proof, which is lower than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.

The judge said that Cresswell’s credibility was not undermined by “minor inconsistencies” in her account, the fact that she had not made the public allegations sooner or by the police’s decision not to take any action.

Additionally the judge ruled that Cresswell’s publications were “on a matter of public interest”, that Cresswell believed that it was in the public interest to publish them and that her belief was reasonable in all of the circumstances.

The media would normally be expected to have contacted a subject for comment before publishing allegations. But, crucially, the judge held that it would have been “unreasonable” to expect Cresswell to have sought a comment from Hay or included his denial because she was “writing from her own knowledge of the sexual assault on her”.

Four years after the Court of Appeal ruled that the public interest defence was not limited to the media, the case is believed to be the first where an alleged victim has successfully relied on it when the other party has sued for libel.

Lawyers suggest that it sets an important precedent in relation to the discussion of “experiences of sexual violence” online.

Tamsin Allen, a partner at the law firm Bindmans, who represented Cresswell, says that the judgment “gives much-needed support and guidance to women who seek to name their attackers to protect others”. The ruling, she says, clarifies the law for those who claim to have been silenced by their alleged abusers and failed by the police.

Allen describes the ruling as “a powerful testament to the bravery” of Cresswell “in defending the claim over two years at huge personal cost, and underlines calls for reform in libel law so that public interest publications can more easily be defended”.

Welcoming the ruling, Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor and founder of the Centre for Women’s Justice, says she hopes that it will “serve as a warning to men seeking to silence those that accuse them of sexual assault that there are big risks involved in resorting to the libel courts”.

Wistrich states that Hay sought to rely on the “woefully deficient police investigation” and a “range of rape myths and stereotypes” about Cresswell’s behaviour after the sexual assault in an attempt to undermine the truth of her allegations. She says: “The carefully considered judgment takes proper account of guidance on such rape myths and stereotypes and entirely, properly criticises the original police investigation.”

Jonathan Price, a barrister at Doughty Street, represented Cresswell. His colleague, Clare Wisson, notes that the judgment “shows that courts will not shy away from findings of truth, notwithstanding the absence of a criminal investigation, caution or conviction”.

In determining the truth defence, she says “the judge exhibited a nuanced understanding of the impact of trauma on memory and on the victim’s responses to sexual assault”.

Wisson stresses, however, that the ruling “does not provide a carte blanche for survivors to name perpetrators”. Cresswell still needed to be able to prove the truth of the allegation to the civil standard, Wisson says, and the judge warned that had her allegation been found to be deliberately false, then her public interest defence would have failed.

“The case leaves unanswered the question of whether a survivor sued for libel could successfully defend a case on the basis of a public interest defence alone,” she adds.

Jonathan Coad, who has represented members of the royal family and the Beckhams as claimants, highlights the importance of the case, calling it an “acute moment” in striking the balance between freedom of speech and privacy.

Helena Shipman, a solicitor at the claimant law firm Cater-Ruck, says that the judgment demonstrates “the vast improvements in the sensitivity and nuance with which the libel courts approach cases that deal with #MeToo type allegations, including by taking steps to ensure that vulnerable witnesses could properly participate in the litigation, as well as by explicitly recognising the effect of the fallibility of memory on evidence”.

Cresswell was allowed to give evidence from behind a screen, and otherwise to attend remotely, and arrangements were made to ensure the parties did not come into contact at court.

Kevin Turnbull, a partner at TT Law, who represented Hay, was contacted but declined to comment.

(Source)

In 1980s London one council decided that as gay men are oppressed, they must all be good. The results were catastrophic. Today most British institutions are similarly treating trans women as a sacred caste. Is nothing learnt from such safeguarding disasters?

Westminster’s prevention of Royal Assent is all that stopped Scotland’s gender recognition reforms allowing any man to legally become a woman by self-identifying as one. Despite their stance that “transwomen are women”, transactivists and politicians, including the former First Minister of Scotland repeatedly refused to state whether the trans woman Isla Bryson, a convicted rapist, is in fact a woman. “What’s relevant is that the individual is a rapist,” said Nicola Sturgeon when pressed for an answer.

“I don’t believe Isla Bryson is truly, and genuinely, a trans woman,” said SNP leadership candidate Humza Yousaf to Sophie Ridge on Sky News, when asked about Sturgeon’s disastrous attempts to pass the law on self-identification. “I think they’re trying to play the system for personal advantage.”

What is a “true trans woman”? I recall the case of Steve Wright, the serial killer of women in street prostitution in Ipswich. Many sex trade apologists, hell-bent on defending the rights of men to pay for sex, argued fiercely that Wright (who was well known to the women as a “regular”) was simply “masquerading” as a sex buyer. 

Wright was a prolific punter, paying for sex with the most vulnerable women — five of whom he went on to murder — but somehow he was merely engaged in a Judith Butler-inspired discourse in gender performativity? 

Yousaf acknowledges that self-identification policies are exploited by men claiming to be women yet appears to be just fine with it, even though he knows that this places women and girls in danger. The pro-prostitution lobbyists that insisted that because Steve Wright was not a punter, his heinous acts of violence were not performed by a punter, are doing the same as Sturgeon and Yousaf by burying their heads in the sand and ignoring the murky reality. Either way, their disregard for the safety and wellbeing of potential and actual victims is shocking. 

Trans women, it seems, are by definition always blameless. Where politically necessary they cease to be categorised as trans, becoming predatory men, paedophiles or rapists. Anyone classifying trans women sex offenders as a subset of predatory men, rather than as a separate and “vulnerable” class, is denounced as transphobic. 

Similarly, it’s verboten to point out that some trans women may be publicly indulging a fetish rather than expressing an identity, despite the formal recognition of transvestic fetishism as a paraphilia — one that has been associated with indecent exposure. Trans women are always innocent, stunning and brave: it’s policy.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale. In the 1980s, one local authority took its support for gay rights to similar extremes, enabling the institutional abuse of children in its care. Labour-run Islington Council treated gay workers as if they could do no wrong — much as trans people are treated by the SNP today.

In 1985, Margaret Hodge, Islington’s then leader, introduced a “positive action” drive to recruit gay and minority ethnic people into Council jobs, including sensitive roles working with children. So far so good. But an independent inquiry into the Council revealed how this well-intentioned policy heralded an end to effective recruitment checks and became a strong disincentive to challenging bad practice.

Recruitment in Islington was overseen by an Equal Opportunities Unit which set about removing the safeguards that might have stopped a prolific child abuser infiltrating a children’s home. Gone was a requirement to provide references from an employer — references from friends were accepted. Appointing officers were not allowed to challenge the status or suitability of these “friend” referees. Interview panels were banned from asking about disciplinary action or absence records. 

The positive discrimination policy had serious unintended consequences, the inquiry found. Staff were able to exploit children for their own purposes while managers felt unable to discipline or dismiss staff from marginalised communities. “It cannot be a coincidence that of the 32 staff named in these records, a number fall within these groups,” the report said.

“Intelligent and well-meaning women even categorically advised the council that gay men were less likely to abuse children than heterosexual men. Those raising safeguarding concerns were vilified as homophobic,” according to Eileen Fairweather, the journalist who broke the story of the abuse.

What followed was years of violence and abuse of exceptionally vulnerable children in Islington-run homes. The two-part Evening Standard exposé revealed pimps and predatory child abusers were both visiting, and staying in, children’s rooms. Accounts from former residents described rapes and beatings. 

Children were given drugs, introduced to porn, impregnated and abused into prostitution. Their stories were supported by staff who had tried to blow the whistle. The Standard accused Islington of a “slavish adherence to a confused ideology” which allowed abusers to shelter behind gay rights and meant that Islington could dismiss its critics as “bigots”.

Concerns about pimps of African Caribbean heritage were dismissed as racist. In contrast, Neville Mighty — a Jamaican-born whistle-blower who was one of the first to try to stop the abuse — was himself accused of inappropriate behaviour, and sacked.

Margaret Hodge’s response was to dismiss the Standard’s reporting as “gutter journalism”. Her attitude was typical of Islington’s “Stalinist reluctance” to study the facts when they failed to fit the theory. “If gays are oppressed, then all gay men are good, was its simplistic credo,” Fairweather wrote in the Independent in 1995. “Men who hurt boys were not ‘gay’ — they were paedophiles.”

“Paedophiles cynically exploited the gay rights banner and those who suspected this were branded as reactionary,” Fairweather wrote. “We were all branded right-wing homophobes.” A social worker who rang alarm bells about a children’s home worker she suspected of abusing a young boy was investigated for being “anti-equal opportunities”. The boy later said he had been raped by the children’s home worker. Presenting her findings at a feminist conference, Fairweather was heckled for “abusing” children by women who had been taken in by a claim (repeated by Hodge on LBC radio and widely reported) that the Standard had bribed children to make the allegations.

In 1995, after multiple further articles and internal enquiries, the independent White inquiry validated the Standard’s journalism, concluding that Islington Council had both allowed the conditions for “dangerous and negligent professional practice” to flourish, and failed to investigate claims of abuse as it should have done. The inquiry reported that individuals were able to turn this to their advantage while the institution was “paralysed by equal opportunity and race issues”.

The same topsy-turvy approach to risk is being employed across our institutions. There’s the DBS policy which makes it easier for trans people to hide any past offending; the Scottish prison risk assessment template that is entirely focused on threats to, rather than posed by, male sex offenders in female jails; the NHS policies likening patients objecting to males on women-only wards to racists; the Police Chiefs’ guidance that says male officers may conduct intimate searches of women and girls from the moment the officer begins transition and women’s objections may be recorded as a hate crime, despite legislation stating that intimate searches must be performed by an officer of the same sex as the detainee. 

Nowhere in any of these policies is there any consideration of the more vulnerable party: the child taught by a DBS-checked tutor; the mentally ill female prisoner; the old woman on a hospital ward; the teenage girl in custody. No-one is considered as vulnerable as the 6’2’’ newly-minted “woman” with quarterback shoulders and barely-disguised bulge.

The White report conceded the possibility that due to the council’s failures, child abusers were still working in children’s homes — a situation it described as a “deplorable state of affairs”. In 2017 the then council leader Richard Watts issued an apology to survivors for what he called “the darkest chapter in the council’s history”.

The last five years have seen a steady and growing stream of self-identified trans women convicted or accused of sexual and violent offences, including the former Tory councillor, David Smith, who had campaigned for gender neutral toilets across Middlesbrough.

At the same time, investigations into trans activists have revealed them as having deeply unsavoury habits or associations, or to have made violent threats against critics of self-ID. The Green Party candidate, Aimee Challenor, used his father as an election agent, despite knowing he was charged with raping a ten-year-old, then married a man who had posted child abuse fantasies on Twitter; Scottish Greens activist, Beth Douglas is under investigation for threatening tweets. The NUS transgender official, Jess Bradley was suspended after allegedly posting blog pictures in which he was exposing his own genitals in public. The result of the investigation was never announced.

Prisons data in the UK and elsewhere have consistently shown that incarcerated trans women are proportionately much more likely than other male prisoners to be sex offenders. And as long ago as 2015, the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists gave evidence to a parliamentary inquiry on transgender equality of “an ever-increasing tide of referrals [to gender identity clinics] of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences”.

When the evidence points in the opposite direction, no reasonable policy will emerge out of pretending that trans people are incapable of being (or somehow less likely to be) sexual offenders. Males with trans identities can and do sexually offend — arguably at a higher rate than other males. Let’s not wait for another children’s home scandal before acknowledging this.

Jenny Lindsay knows exactly when her “cancellation” began. It was June 2019 when the poet and performer tweeted her shock at the violent words of a columnist for an arts magazine, who had written: “Take out the Terf trash. Make them afraid. Get in their faces.”

How “extraordinary that such views are given an airing” in any publication, Lindsay wrote, adding “for clarity” that the columnist, a trans woman called Cathy Brennan, was advocating attacks on women, “Terf” being the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Lindsay’s response seemed reasonable, even understated, given that days later Brennan was under police investigation for lunging at Julie Bindel, the campaigner against violence against women, after an event in Edinburgh.

Yet for all her apparent good sense, Lindsay’s tweet made her a host of unseen enemies. Over following weeks and months she was the victim of smears and rumours online. Offers of work began to drift away as performers and venues were peppered with demands not to give her a platform.

“You can’t prove you’re being no-platformed but the opportunities simply don’t come,” Lindsay, from Ayr, said. “It is so much easier for people simply not to book me and to say, ‘Know what, booking Jenny is seen as a statement of some sort, so book someone safer’.

“That’s how cancel culture works — it’s not about one venue cancelling, it’s about the culture around you becoming so toxic that people stop calling or offering you work.”

Lindsay is the kind of woman Joanna Cherry referred to last week when the MP condemned the “new form of McCarthyism” around gender ideology, which some believe is poisoning the arts and education in Scotland.

In Cherry’s case, her in-conversation event at the Stand Comedy Club was cancelled because staff “expressed their concerns” about her views, which in Cherry’s simple description amount to “biological sex is an immutable fact”. If cancellation could happen to a public figure such as herself, she said, “just think how much more likely it is to happen to women who have less power”.

Cherry cited individuals who had suffered, including Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor who quit Sussex University after she was “ostracised” by students for her gender-critical views, and Rosie Kay, the choreographer, who left the company she founded after she clashed with her dancers over the “biological reality” of being a woman.

Lindsay and others in Scotland find themselves facing the same pressures. Magi Gibson, another poet and performer, describes herself as a lifelong promoter of “dangerous women” who for decades has worked with some of the most marginalised people in society. Now she is tainted with “bigotry” and “transphobia”, and venues have been urged not to book her.

Gibson said: “I was doing an event at the Scottish Poetry Library and they were told my presence made the place ‘unsafe’. I was 67 at the time with severe osteoporosis and a broken spine. How ridiculous is that?”

Gibson and her husband, Ian Macpherson, a comic novelist and performer, between them racked up 50 years’ experience on the Live Literature programme. Until last year. In November they declined to sign a revised code of conduct for the Scottish Book Trust, the charity that funds the scheme.

In a letter to Marc Lambert, its chief executive, Gibson said the code “states you will not tolerate bigotry and transphobia. Certainly in the mode in which these terms were used many years ago I would have agreed. This is not many years ago, and you are using these terms as if there is still a safe, neutral application. Yet both these terms are weaponised day in, day out, not to achieve fairness and equality but simply to damage someone — usually a woman — who has legitimate beliefs protected under the Equality Act 2010.”

As a result of their refusal to sign, Gibson and Macpherson lost most of their work and income, and together have to make do with a combined pension of about £20,000.

It is not only the financial penalty that hurts, Gibson said. Worry and anxiety have taken over her life. “It really starts to impact on your mental health,” she said “It starts to destroy your sense of security, that sense that you live in a sane world. Once there was a social contract we all agreed to — apart from criminals — but we aren’t all agreed anymore. I feel like I am walking on eggshells yet I have never been anti-trans or transphobic.”

Lindsay’s outrage at the attacks she has faced online reflects a similar sense of vulnerability. Her show, a “poetic memoir” of feminism and sexual violence, won a John Byrne Award for critical thinking, but her opponents were not interested in its artistic merits.

“The cruelty of some of these activists is obscene,” she said. “One of the most awful things I heard was ‘You weaponised your own rape to attack trans people by stealth’. What a hideous thing to say.

“It is misogyny, rank hatred of women talking about our lives. When women in particular share the bad things that have happened to them, or even their emotions, people mock them.

“You see it in the responses to people like Kathleen Stock or Rosie Kay — any glimmer of vulnerability and activists find it hilarious.”

She hopes recent events will cause the tide to turn. Last month a crowd of activists organised by a collective calling itself Cabaret Against the Hate Speech, noisily prevented the screening of Adult Human Female, a documentary critiquing gender ideology, at Edinburgh University. It was the second time that the screening had been halted by protesters, and the headlines have heaped pressure on the university to uphold free speech.

“The public hates this, the no-platforming,” Lindsay said. “It is such an elitist thing, people just want to read good books and see good shows.”

Last week Womanword, a poetry show, was announced featuring Gibson, Lindsay and Elaine Miller, an Edinburgh Fringe performer who achieved notoriety when she “flashed” a pubic wig as MSPs voted on contentious gender recognition reform.

As soon as Womanword was announced, Cabaret Against the Hate Speech sent a social media message to Blackfriars, the venue, demanding that it be scrapped. It promptly sold out.

It seems for a moment that Lindsay could laugh off all this stuff. It’s “insane, stupid, ridiculous,” she said. “But we alway have to come back to the reason I was cancelled — for opposing violence against women, for saying lesbians shouldn’t be punched in the throat. I don’t know how we get around it, but it has to stop.”

Tender souls are fashionable souls and disagreement is not just ugly, it is an act of violence. This helps explain the preposterous spectacle of an MP, Joanna Cherry, being told that a planned event at The Stand comedy club in Edinburgh, scheduled for this August, would no longer take place. According to the venue, “key operational staff” were “unwilling to work on this event” for fear they might accidentally be exposed to opinions with which they might disagree. My, the horror of it.

Cherry’s sin is to hold beliefs on transgender issues that are shared by most members of the public. She insists upon a distinction between biological sex and legal sex. No reasonable person can sensibly conclude this is “hate speech” and Cherry, like other feminists, is only guilty of asserting that what is real is also true.

A civilised society may be marked by the extent to which reasonable disagreement remains possible. By that standard, Scotland is an increasingly uncivilised — and priggish — place. “No debate” is the censorious mantra deployed by campaigners erroneously convinced they enjoy monopolies on virtue, kindness and decency. The people who most deplore so-called “culture wars” are also often its most vicious practitioners. Those who disagree with them must be shamed into silence. This is Scotland, a land of witches

Remarkably, these matters occasion extraordinary quantities of earnest hand-wringing. It is all so very difficult, isn’t it? Actually, thumbsuckers, it is not. It is, in fact, astonishingly simple. Either you side with the censors or you take a stand against them. There is no middle ground, no trimming or temporising, no halfway house in which everyone may gather and pretend to be friends.

Cherry is accused of “transphobia”, a term now so broad it has become functionally meaningless. If Cherry is transphobic then so is reality. The expansive definition of transphobia favoured by trans activists now decrees that lesbians who do not wish to sleep with natal males are bigots. Suggesting that homosexuality means same-sex attraction is — apparently — a transphobic “dogwhistle”. This is a very modern kind of madness but there we have it.

According to Lorna Slater, the Green MSP and junior minister in the Scottish government, “if staff at one particular venue are saying, ‘You know, I’m not comfortable working at this event because I’m not comfortable with the views being expressed’, I think those staff have the right to not be working in support of some views they find really, you know, upsetting in terms of how they tackle human rights.” This is gibberish, albeit of a predictable sort. “This isn’t a question of free speech,” Slater insists, blind to the obvious reality that it plainly is.

Slater is a bona fide simpleton but her views appear to be shared by a distressing number of parliamentarians, at least some of whom might be expected to know a little better. Others simply prefer to duck the question.

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Angus Robertson — the culture secretary, for heaven’s sake! — declined to take any kind of a position. “If you’ll forgive me,” he waffled, “I’m not going to land myself in the middle of a live issue where some people are saying that they don’t want or are unable to go forward with an event and there are others saying there’s a legal requirement for that to take place.” This was pusillanimous even by the debased standards of contemporary Scottish politics. The following day, Shirley-Anne Somerville whined that “two senior SNP politicians have been asked about this on successive days”. Verily, a profile in courage there.

If Cherry decides to sue The Stand, she will almost certainly win her case. Last year Glasgow city council and the Scottish Event Campus broke the law when they cancelled an appearance at the Hydro by the American evangelist Franklin Graham because they disliked, and disagreed with, his purported views on a number of issues. They were guilty of discriminating against Graham, contravening the terms of the Equality Act which protects his — and everyone else’s — religious and philosophical beliefs.

As Sheriff John McCormick noted in his ruling in the Graham case: “A theme amongst those seeking cancellation of the event included prefacing their remarks with a professed belief in free speech while denying that right to others and denying third parties their choice to attend.” This is the culture of the moment, right enough, and it is one of which we should be ashamed.

The Equality Act protects everyone; it is not a weapon to be deployed against those deemed guilty of wrong-think. These protections apply to so-called “gender critical” views just as much as they, quite properly, apply to claims made by trans activists.

Many of our parliamentarians either do not understand this or prefer to pretend that reality may be suspended when its weight becomes too much to bear. Thus Isla Bryson, the rapist formerly known as Adam Graham, was a woman up until the point of conviction, when Bryson magically forfeited the right to identify, and be accepted, as a woman. Self-ID, however, is either universal or it is a nonsense. MSPs voted to remove “gatekeeping” from the gender reassignment process and now squirm when the predictable consequences of removing safeguards are exposed for all to see. Well, they voted for it and it is reasonable to expect them to own the repercussions of their own decisions.

So-called “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, say the people determined to make it a reality. This will be news to those on the receiving end of it. Like JK Rowling, Cherry is determined to speak out because she has a platform; many other people, most of them women, do not enjoy that luxury. Reasonable people have no wish to make life harder for trans people but reasonable people may also appreciate there are occasions when rights conflict. At no point have I seen Cherry say anything which could plausibly be considered “hateful”.

A choice must be made. Either you stand with the censors or you ally yourself with those who appreciate the importance of liberty. It is beyond depressing that so many of our parliamentarians are either explicitly or implicitly on the side of those hostile to liberalism and the foundational principles of a democratic society. That is the real test here and, dispiritingly, many of our MSPs utterly fail it.

I was at a talk in London recently when I noticed a man waiting to meet me. He was an inner-city GP, he said, and there was a group that wished to speak to me — had I heard of CAN-SG? I have now. Over the past week I’ve spoken to several members of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, set up about three years ago by and for clinicians in the UK and Ireland who want greater understanding of the effects of sex and gender in healthcare.

In other words, it’s a group of medical professionals who are concerned that the creep of gender ideology into their profession is compromising their duty to do no harm. Some told me they had been accused by their own colleagues of transphobia for — in one instance — not using a patient’s chosen pronouns when discussing their case, even though the patient wasn’t present. “It’s confusing to describe a young female patient’s history of sexual abuse and trauma if I have to refer to her as ‘him’,” said an NHS psychiatrist.

Others described their frustration with medical institutions such as the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which in November publicly rebuked its own members on Twitter for asking questions after an equality, diversity and inclusion training session in which it was claimed, among other things, that biological sex is “socially contrived” as opposed to a scientific fact. In February the college proudly announced it had received a gold award from Stonewall’s LGBT workplace equality scheme, which some have accused of stifling free speech.

Many mentioned the deletion of the word “woman” from some NHS web pages about the menopause and ovarian and cervical cancer, which one GP described to me as “a travesty that will be harmful to women”.

Almost all asked to be anonymous in this article. “The level of fear is pretty strong among our members. We have GPs, nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, academics. But about half our members work in the psychiatric professions, because they have been at the sharp end of the risks of gender-affirming care and the lack of evidence,” CAN-SG’s co-chairwoman Dr Louise Irvine, a retired GP, told me.

“Gender-affirming care” refers to the theory that if a patient says they feel their gender does not match their biological sex, the medical professional must immediately agree with them. According to gender ideologues, if a doctor asks the patient questions such as, “When did this feeling start, and could it have anything to do with your sexuality?”, that is tantamount to gay conversion therapy. “Several colleagues have been accused within their profession of conversion therapy just for asking their patients questions, which does make you nervous,” one GP told me. And how old are the younger patients who have come to the GP with gender dysphoria? “Anywhere between 11 and 14. Mainly girls who had previously identified as lesbians.”

At first I was surprised that CAN-SG has to exist at all. Since Dr Hilary Cass published her interim review last year, which heavily criticised the gender-affirming treatment given to young people with gender dysphoria at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, I assumed sense was returning to the medical sector. GIDS is scheduled to close imminently and be replaced by regional hubs. Hadn’t the argument been settled, at least in the medical profession?

“I wish it were that simple. But people who worked at GIDS will work at the new hubs, and then there are the effects of pressure groups such as Mermaids, the LGBT Foundation, the Trans Gap Project and so on,” one consultant psychiatrist told me. “Pressure groups set themselves up as experts in ‘LGBTQIA healthcare’, but those are all very different groups of people with very different needs. The groups obfuscate the differences between sex and gender, which in the medical profession has hugely negative effects, and they all promote transition,” added a GP.

CAN-SG has about 100 members, with more joining every week. It is a support group for its members, and it advocates more evidence-based treatment of those with gender dysphoria. One of the many ironies in gender activism is that the people who claim to care most about those with gender dysphoria are invariably the ones rushing them towards deeply experimental — to say the least — psychological and medical procedures. The clinicians in CAN-SG are trying to adhere to the aims of the profession and help rather than harm their patients. “The Cass report helped to put the brakes on medicalising young people in the NHS, but we mustn’t underestimate the impact of the private sector and the financial element,” a GP told me.

In the US, where healthcare is largely a private enterprise, medicalising children and adults with gender dysphoria is huge business, and anyone who queries this is denounced by the left as a transphobe (another irony: seeing the US left defend Big Pharma). But America increasingly looks wackily out of step. Countries such as Norway, France, Finland and the Netherlands are urging caution about medicalising children with gender dysphoria. In the UK there is more moderation and nuance than in America, but, Dr Irvine says, “We have members who have been accused of transphobia for asking to see the evidence behind medicalised gender treatments. But it is very clear the evidence is weak. We are not the outliers here. Sex really does matter.”

The above is by Ted Chiang, writing about AI, and the whole article is the most sensible response I have seen to ChatGPT4 in the past few weeks (no 'it's going to turn itself into a god!' or 'it's going to turn us all into paperclips!').

What struck me, reading these two paragraphs, is that I know exactly why corporations are not going to start boasting about how much they pay their workers, or how much tax they pay. Because instead, they can boast about pronoun use and gender-neutral toilets; things that cost them nothing, but exact a cost from their female employees.

'Identity politics' is the biggest pro-capitalist PsyOps ever, and an Artificial General Intelligence didn't come up with it, stupid human beings did!

Leor Sapir on twitter

Sunny Bryant is only 9 years old—but already an old hand at testifying before lawmakers. The youngster from Houston was 4 when she first asked her mother, “Why did you make me a boy? I wanted to be a girl,” as she was being strapped into a car seat. Since then, Sunny and her mother have spoken at the Texas legislature at least five times, entering the political spotlight amid a nationwide surge in attempts to ban child gender transition. This year, 12 states have passed laws to prohibit or sharply restrict the practice.

On March 27 this year, Sunny missed school and waited until late into the night to speak in front of a Texas House of Representatives committee as it considered H.B. 1686, which would ban puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgery for under-18s in the state. (The bill is currently pending.) “If you pass this bill and we stay in Texas, I’d grow up looking like my dad, and that’s a scary thought,” she told the legislators. “I want to grow up looking like me—nobody else, just Sunny.”

How parents and doctors can best support children like Sunny is a fraught question, because of the uncertain medical evidence and the volatile political climate in the United States. A polarized, incendiary debate over child transition is playing out in red and blue states alike: H.B. 1686 is one of more than 450 bills proposed or passed in this year’s state legislative sessions that the American Civil Liberties Union characterizes as anti-LGBTQ. On a single day in Florida two weeks ago, the Republican-dominated House debated limits on drag shows, a bill restricting the provision of trans-inclusive bathrooms, and a ban on youth transition. “I feel like they’re making these kids the ‘other’ and trying to make them out to be bogeymen and bogeywomen,” Fentrice Driskell, the Florida House’s Democratic leader, told me. In a committee hearing last month, for example, Representative Webster Barnaby, a Republican, referred to trans people as “mutants” and “demons.” (He later apologized.) Of the ban on child transition, Driskell added, “This will lead to more transgender youth taking their lives.”

In the United States, then, the debate around child gender medicine has split along partisan lines: Left-leaning activist groups and the White House regularly describe child transition as “lifesaving” and raise the specter of suicide if care is withdrawn. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former President Donald Trump have called medical transition “child abuse.” If the most extreme red-state bills go ahead, both parents and doctors could face prosecution for giving a child access to treatment.

I believe that these bans on child transition are unhelpful, illiberal, and in many cases disturbingly punitive—and I say that as someone with serious reservations about the most influential model of child gender care in America.

More than 100 gender-care clinics in the United States treat children, according to Reuters. Because the U.S. health-care system is decentralized, and because a long-awaited study of youth gender care funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has yet to report its full findings, establishing exactly how patients are being treated in these clinics is difficult. But from the statements of leading practitioners, we do know that many have rejected a model called “watchful waiting,” where extensive talk therapy is preferred to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery—or at least seen as a prerequisite for those medical interventions.

Instead they favor “affirmative care,” which is grounded in the belief that “kids know who they are,” even though a 2016 review of the available studies estimated that, without medical interventions, gender dysphoria in children resolves itself during or after puberty in about 80 percent of cases. (Supporters of medical treatment dispute the validity and relevance of that research.) Seven of the 18 U.S. clinics surveyed in the Reuters investigation said they were comfortable prescribing hormones to minors on their first visit. “Providers and their behavior haven’t been closely studied,” wrote Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson, two experienced clinicians in the field, in The Washington Post in 2021, “but we find evidence every single day, from our peers across the country and concerned parents who reach out, that the field has moved from a more nuanced, individualized and developmentally appropriate assessment process to one where every problem looks like a medical one that can be solved quickly with medication or, ultimately, surgery.”

The reason many American liberals give for supporting “gender-affirming care” for children is that they believe the science is settled. Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services, has claimed that there is “no argument among medical professionals” about “the value and importance of gender-affirming care.” The truth of that statement depends in part on the definition of gender-affirming care. Every child experiencing distress deserves supportive treatment, which can take a variety of forms. But the statement by Levine, who is herself trans, can be interpreted as suggesting specifically that hormonal and surgical interventions, perhaps even for younger minors, are uncontroversial among clinicians and indisputably backed by sound science. They are not.