WPATH paid a team at Johns Hopkins to find out whether transitioning children actually works. The team, led by Dr Karen Robinson, did the reviews, graded the evidence and reported back. It found “little to no evidence.” That was not the answer WPATH wanted, so WPATH made sure the answer never got out. After all, it had written into the arrangement that the research be used “for the benefit of advancing transgender health in a positive manner”. It sat on the inconvenient data, until Robinson was reduced to complaining in writing that WPATH was “trying to restrict our ability to publish.”

It’s a single example, but it lights up the rest of the scandal like floodlights over a stadium. This is not the story of a hard question that one side got wrong in good faith. It’s the story of an organisation that knew it had no evidence, and pressed on anyway. We know all this because on 17 June the Federal Trade Commission, joined by the attorneys general of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas, sued the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in a federal court in Fort Worth. WPATH writes the Standards of Care, the document every gender clinic in the West reaches for when a parent asks whether the benefits outweigh the damage.

JK Rowling said that taking down WPATH would be the gender critical Battle of Stalingrad, and here’s what makes this case more than just another skirmish in an endless war. The evidence for it arrives on three separate levels, any one of which would be damning on its own. Put together, they close every exit for the trans movement.

The first level is what WPATH told the public, in writing, under its own name. That medical transition is “medically necessary,” not cosmetic, not elective, but necessary in the way insulin is necessary. That it’s “lifesaving.” That puberty blockers are “fully reversible.” That cross-sex hormones improve mental health, that mastectomies on teenage girls are safe and effective and reliably raise their quality of life, that the whole programme prevents suicide. These are the talking points you hear from trans activists every day. It’s signed, it’s dated, and WPATH can’t disown a word of it.

The second level is what those same people said in private, and it’s the one that rules out an honest mistake. Among themselves, the authors of the Standards of Care admitted that “a global consensus on puberty blockers does not exist” and that a recommendation was “not supported by the data.” A former board member, Dr Erica Anderson, has since conceded there’s barely any long-term research on what blockers do to a developing child. They claimed to use GRADE, the recognised system that forces every recommendation to carry an honest label of the evidence behind it. They rated the evidence for blockers “moderate.” Then, they deleted that rating from the final version, so a “strong recommendation” would imply the high-quality evidence they knew they didn’t have.

And then there are the age limits, which give the game away completely. The draft Standards had minimum ages for surgery. The office of Rachel Levine, at the top of Biden’s health department, leaned on WPATH to take them out, not because the evidence had changed but to deny critics a usable headline. One chapter author laid out the calculation in writing: leave the ages in and “the conservatives” will say WPATH supports “cutting off healthy girl breasts at 15 years old,” take them out and “it doesn’t give them the headline.”

The third level is what all of this did to real children. The case is built partly on sworn statements from the casualties. Detransitioners who were started on this path as kids and are now adults living in the result. Parents who were told to choose between a dead child and a living one. A woman who had her breasts cut off in Texas at fourteen, now grown, who gave written permission to publish the photograph of her scarred chest.

Take the three together and you can see why this is different in kind from everything that came before, because each level shuts a different escape route. The public claims kill any pretence that the language was careful or hedged. The private record kills the “wrong but well-meaning” defence, because they knew. The human evidence kills the idea that the harm was ever theoretical. And the obvious last-ditch line, that this is all hostile outsiders quote-mining children’s medicine for a culture war, dies on contact with the first two levels, because those are WPATH’s own published words and WPATH’s own private emails and depositions. Strike out every detransitioner, every parent, every government investigator, the Cass Review, the European climbdowns, every ordinary person who told the inquiry they’d trusted WPATH completely, and the case barely moves, because its spine was never the outsiders. The worst witness against WPATH is WPATH. The second worst is the evidence review it paid for and buried.

That’s why this doesn’t stay contained to one organisation in Texas. WPATH was the source. It was the body every clinic cited, every charity quoted, every government leaned on, the thing people were pointing at when they said “follow the science.” So when its own authors concede, in their own words, that there was no consensus and no good evidence, the entire structure built on WPATH’s guidelines collapses. The women who said this was an experiment on children, and were called bigots for it, were right. The clinicians hounded out of their jobs for asking about the evidence were right. They were defamed, sacked and in some cases prosecuted by people who had the truth sitting in a drawer the whole time.

Which is where the blame spreads outward, and the list of the complicit is long. Longer than anyone on it will want it to be. A lie this size can’t travel on its own. It needs carriers, and there was no shortage of volunteers. The clinicians who waved children through on a single appointment. The therapists told to affirm and only affirm. The journalists who wrote the smear pieces, and the editors who commissioned them. The charities that fundraised off it. The civil servants who drafted the guidance. The HR departments that made slogans a condition of employment. The MPs who voted for it without reading a single study. The headteachers who socially transitioned children behind their parents’ backs and called it kindness. A great many of them will now say, with some justice, that they were lied to as well. It’s true, but it doesn’t get them off, because the further any of them stood from the actual evidence, the louder they swore it was settled.

It’s worth saying plainly that this is a complaint and not a verdict. These are allegations; WPATH will fight them, and it may yet win. But a defendant whose own emails are the prosecution’s best material is not in a comfortable place.

The evidence wasn’t there. They knew the evidence wasn’t there. They commissioned the proof and buried it when it came back wrong. They deleted the grade that would have given the game away. They pulled the age limits because removing the breasts of children made for bad headlines. And on those matchstick-thin foundations, they continued to wreck the health of healthy children while telling their parents it was medicine.

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The original This Never Happens documented 236 cases of trans-identified males — biological men — committing acts of violence, sexual assault, and predation against women and children.

Of course, these cases continue to pour in and we’ll continue to record them.

Harvey Marcelin (born Harvey Marcelin)

Photo credit: News 12 / South Wales Police (reproduced by the New York Post). In reporting on the sentencing, the New York Post used a mix of plural and male pronouns to refer to Marcelin. The publication wrote: “An 88-year-old transgender Big Apple serial killer will rot behind bars for the rest of their days after savagely hacking up a gal pal...” but later used male pronouns when referencing “his electric wheelchair” and quoted Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez directly stating: “He must be locked away, and today’s sentence ensures that he will never be able to hurt anyone else again.”

On Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 88-year-old serial killer Harvey Marcelin, a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in Brooklyn, New York. Marcelin was convicted of first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence, and concealment of a human corpse for the gruesome March 2022 slaying and dismemberment of 68-year-old Susan Leyden, a vulnerable New Jersey jeweler. The two had met while residing in the same Bronx homeless shelter in 2019. Surveillance footage from late February 2022 captured Leyden entering Marcelin’s Pennsylvania Avenue apartment in Cypress Hills, wheeling a multi-colored floral bag; she was never seen alive again. Inside the apartment, Marcelin bludgeoned Leyden to death and used a reciprocating saw to dismember her body. A few days later, an e-bike rider found Leyden’s torso stuffed in a black garbage bag inside her floral shopping cart on a Brooklyn street corner. In a chilling sequence of events, Marcelin was caught on CCTV rolling into a local 99-cent store in an electric wheelchair with part of Leyden’s severed leg stashed on his lap. Officers subsequently searched Marcelin’s apartment, uncovering the victim’s head, hands, thighs, and arms. Her remaining limbs were never recovered. This horrifying crime represents Marcelin’s third killing of a woman. He previously spent over 50 years in state prisons: first for shooting an ex-girlfriend to death in 1963, and then for stabbing another ex-girlfriend to death in 1984 and dumping her body in Central Park shortly after being paroled. He was released on parole once again in late 2019 after promising to stay out of trouble, only to murder and dismember Leyden, as detailed in the official statement from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.

‘Paula’ Stanton

Photo credit: South Wales Police (reproduced by the Daily Express). In reporting on the case, WalesOnline / Yahoo News UK referred to Stanton using female pronouns exclusively, writing: “A transgender woman has been jailed...” and noting “she admitted carrying out...” and “she put her hand down her trousers.” Conversely, the Daily Express mixed female and male pronouns, starting with “A transgender woman and former soldier has been jailed...” and “she placed her hand...” but later writing: “He made eye contact with one nurse while he was doing it.”

On Monday, June 15, 2026, 62-year-old Paula Stanton of Severn Avenue, Barry, was jailed for just over five months (160 days) at Cardiff Magistrates’ Court for committing an act outraging public decency inside the waiting room of the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. Stanton, a former soldier and Falklands War veteran who identifies as a transgender woman, was transported to the hospital by ambulance in the early hours of May 17 following threats of self-harm. While seated in the waiting room awaiting a mental health assessment, Stanton put his hand down his leggings and began masturbating “in full view” of the nurses’ desk. The prosecutor, Lewis Ball, told the court that staff witnessed Stanton holding his penis and moving his hand up and down, periodically making direct eye contact with a female nurse on duty, as reported in the WalesOnline coverage. When arrested, Stanton claimed “I did nothing wrong” and refused to answer questions during interviews. Stanton is a serial sex offender with 12 previous convictions for 19 offenses, including five sex offenses committed between 2019 and 2025. Her prior crimes include indecently exposing himself by performing a sex act inside a car and performing a sex act in a window while wearing women’s lingerie in full view of female pedestrians. This latest offense put Stanton in breach of a six-month suspended sentence handed down in August 2025. Recorder Barry Clarke stated that only immediate custody was justified, sentencing Stanton to 100 days for the public masturbation and an additional 60 days consecutive for the suspended sentence breach.

‘Amanda Joy’ Cooper

No photo available of the perpetrator. In reporting on the federal court hearing, Global News / The Canadian Press referred to Cooper using female pronouns exclusively, writing: “A lawyer representing a trans woman incarcerated in a men’s prison says her client...” and quoting her lawyer that “she fears for her physical safety, her sexual safety and her emotional safety.” However, public comments on the Global News portal used male pronouns, with one reader noting: “It’s ‘He’, not ‘She’, that’s why he is in a male prison.”

On Monday, June 15, 2026, the Federal Court of Canada in New Brunswick heard a judicial review petition on behalf of 58-year-old Amanda Joy Cooper, a biological male and designated “dangerous offender” currently seeking a transfer from a maximum-security men’s prison to a federal women’s facility. Cooper was convicted in 2001 of four counts of sexual assault, three counts of assault, forcible confinement, and uttering threats; all of her victims were women, including a vulnerable 14-year-old girl. While serving her sentence, Cooper came out as transgender in 2020 and underwent full gender-affirming vaginoplasty surgery in 2024. Her lawyer, Jessica Rose, argued before Justice Janet Fuhrer that because Cooper now has female anatomy, she is at extreme risk in a maximum-security men’s prison. Cooper claims she has been groped, harassed, and threatened by male inmates at the Atlantic Institution in Renous, New Brunswick, and has consequently spent the last two years voluntarily confined to structured intervention units (segregation) for her own safety. However, federal lawyer Laura Rhodes argued on behalf of the Correctional Service of Canada that Cooper’s transfer request to a women’s facility in Quebec was rightly denied in 2024 because her history of severe sexual violence against women means she represents an unacceptable security risk to female inmates and staff. Fuhrer reserved her decision, which remains pending. Cooper is also seeking an interlocutory injunction to be housed at the Fraser Valley Institution for Women in British Columbia while the court proceedings are ongoing, as reported in the Global News article.

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Fred Sargeant was at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969. The following year he co-founded the first Pride march in New York. In September 2022, at the age of 74, he went to a Pride event in Burlington, Vermont, carrying a sign, and a crowd of trans activists slapped him about the head, poured coffee on him, stole his belongings and shoved him to the ground. He went to hospital for a CT scan. The local gay organisations said nothing.

Hold that image while you read about last week’s news from Oxford. Dr Michael Foran, an associate professor of law whose work was cited by the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland ruling, has cancelled his own lecture series. Twice in a fortnight, activists planted themselves in front of his lectern and told the audience he was a bigot hiding transphobia behind “a thin veneer of academia”. Foran called it off because he couldn’t promise his students they’d be able to sit in a lecture theatre without being harassed. An expert in equality law, run out of a lecture hall at one of the world’s great universities, for the crime of explaining what the law says.

The standard reading of all this, the one I’ve spent years making myself, is that it’s a war on women. And it is. But line up the casualties and another pattern emerges, one that almost nobody in the legacy gay press will touch. Over and over, the people in front of the mob are gay.

Start with the lesbians, because they got it first and they got it worst. Kathleen Stock, lesbian, hounded out of Sussex in 2021, then heckled at the Oxford Union two years later by a protester who glued herself to the floor. Jo Phoenix, lesbian, professor of criminology, compared by a colleague to a racist uncle at Christmas dinner and harassed out of the Open University that same year. A tribunal found 23 separate incidents of harassment and awarded her the win on nearly every count. One detail from that judgment deserves to be famous: a senior academic said he’d contact the local LGBT centre to stop Phoenix researching lesbian erasure. An LGBT centre, deployed against a lesbian.

Allison Bailey is a black lesbian who spent more than twenty years as a criminal defence barrister. When she helped found LGB Alliance in 2019 she received a torrent of abuse including threats of sexual violence. Rather than rushing to her defence, Stonewall complained to her chambers. Garden Court announced an investigation on Twitter, and a tribunal later found she’d been discriminated against and victimised for her beliefs. Julie Bindel, lesbian, gave a talk in Edinburgh in 2019 about male violence against women in which she never mentioned trans people. A trans activist waited outside and tried to punch her. Three years later Nottingham council banned her from speaking in its libraries, citing its commitment to Stonewall.

And you don’t need a lectern to qualify. At Pride Cymru in 2022, police escorted lesbians out of the march for carrying banners saying trans activism erases lesbians. One of the women asked the officer to confirm what was happening. “You are removing lesbians from an LGBT march, is that what you’re doing?” Yes, he said. For your safety.

Now widen the lens, because this isn’t a British eccentricity. In Australia in 2023, the Lesbian Action Group asked the Human Rights Commission for permission to hold a lesbian-only event on International Lesbian Day at the publicly funded Victorian Pride Centre. Permission. To meet. The Commission said no, on the grounds that excluding men who identify as lesbians would be discrimination. Three years before that, Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras dropped its one lesbian-focused panel because the lesbian on it, the YouTuber Arielle Scarcella, holds the view that lesbians are female. Scarcella says she’s never been more cancelled and tormented than by her own community.

In Canada in 2023, Robert Wintemute, a gay professor of human rights law who spent his career litigating for gay rights across Europe, returned to his alma mater, McGill, to give a talk. A hundred protesters chanted that he was Nazi scum, stormed the room, threw flour over him and forced him to shelter in the dean’s office. In France, at Bordeaux Pride in September 2021, a trans-identified male lit a flare and aimed it at lesbians from the collectif Résistance Lesbienne. Their banner read “lesbians don’t have penises”. For stating the defining fact of female homosexuality, someone tried to set them on fire.

And then there are the crickets. In October 2024, at the annual conference of LGB Alliance, the only charity in Britain that exists solely for same-sex attracted people, six activists smuggled in around 6,000 live crickets and dumped them into a hall of 600 people. The talk they sabotaged was by Jamie Reed, the whistleblower from an American gender clinic. An Austrian Green MP due to speak called the attack what it was: homophobia, plain and simple, because it’s unbearable to them when lesbians and gays meet to discuss their rights. Not one mainstream gay charity defended the victims. Insects, released on homosexuals, at their own conference, in Westminster, and Stonewall couldn’t find its voice.

Call it what it is. This is a war on gay people, and like any war it has its targets, its weapons and its objective.

The targets run from the elders to the youngest lesbian who won’t date a man. Sargeant was at Stonewall itself. Simon Fanshawe co-founded Stonewall UK, and when Edinburgh students elected him rector, academics drafted a letter of denunciation within hours. Bev Jackson founded the Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and co-founded LGB Alliance because Stonewall quietly swapped “same-sex attracted” for “same-gender attracted” in 2015, a one-word edit that defined homosexuality out of existence. Martina Navratilova came out as a lesbian in 1981, when doing so cost her millions in endorsements. Thirty-eight years later, Athlete Ally, a charity set up to support gay athletes, threw her off its board for saying men shouldn’t compete in women’s sport. These are the people who won every freedom the movement now enjoys, and it beats them in the street. Behind them stand the working generation, the Stocks and Baileys and Phoenixes, sacked, sued and shouted down for knowing what their elders knew. A movement that does this has not evolved. It has been occupied.

The weapons are gay people’s own institutions. Stonewall, founded to defend gay people from persecution, filed the complaint against Bailey. Athlete Ally, set up to support gay athletes, expelled the most famous gay athlete alive. Sydney’s Mardi Gras began in 1978 as a march the police broke up with batons and arrests, and now it cancels lesbians on behalf of men. Build a replacement for these corrupted institutions and they come for them too. Mermaids dragged LGB Alliance through a quarter-million-pound legal fight over its right to exist as a charity, while Australia’s Human Rights Commission decided that lesbians meeting without men present would be discrimination. Women at least know the institutions were never theirs. Gay people watched thirty years of their own infrastructure get captured and turned around to fire on them.

And the objective isn’t any gay person in particular. It’s homosexuality itself. Gender ideology says the body is irrelevant and self-declaration is everything. Homosexuality says the body is the whole point. A lesbian’s no is the one thing the ideology cannot survive, which is why the slur for it, “genital preferences”, treats same-sex attraction as a bigotry to be trained out.

So yes, it’s a war on women, and women have borne the worst of it, but it was never only that. The activists understood from the beginning that the two groups who could falsify the doctrine were women, whose lives depend on the difference, and gay people, whose desires turn on it. That’s why the same fists keep finding the same faces. Kathleen Stock and Allison Bailey and Fred Sargeant and Michael Foran aren’t collateral damage in this so-called ‘culture war’. Gay people, lesbians especially, are key targets, and the tell is that nobody who claims to speak for them will do so.

The people who threw flour at a gay rights lawyer, who beat a Stonewall veteran, who released a plague of insects on a hall full of homosexuals, call everyone else homophobic. At some point you have to stop arguing the toss and count the bodies on the floor. The bodies are gay. They keep being gay. And the organisations with rainbows in their logos keep stepping over them.

The flag says it plainly enough. They took the colours Fred Sargeant marched under and rammed a chevron through the flank, new colours, pointed like an arrowhead, advancing. It's a victory standard now, flying over the territory he fought for, while he and those he fought for are left face down underneath it.

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The original This Never Happens documented 236 cases of trans-identified males — biological men — committing acts of violence, sexual assault, and predation against women and children.

Of course, these cases continue to pour in and we’ll continue to record them.

Andrea Balcer (born Andrew Balcer)

Photo credit: WGME CBS 13. Pronoun usage note: Publications reporting on the expansion of this lawsuit used female or gender-neutral plural pronouns when referring to Balcer. WGME mixed female and neutral plural pronouns, stating, “The lawsuit alleges transgender inmate Andrea Balcer made unwanted sexual contact... and exposed themselves to the three female inmates...” and noting “she was known as Andrew Balcer.” The Law Commentary article similarly used female pronouns, writing that female inmate Sargent “claims Balcer regularly harassed her, threatened to rape her, and exposed herself.” The Bangor Daily News largely avoided pronouns for Balcer, referring to the perpetrator by name (”Andrea Balcer” or “Balcer”), while referencing the female victims with female pronouns.

A high-profile controversy in Maine’s prison system has significantly intensified. On Thursday, May 28, 2026, three additional incarcerated women—Jennifer Albert, Michaela Sargent, and Danielle Foster—officially signed onto a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the Maine Department of Corrections. The lawsuit, originally initiated in April 2026 by female inmate Katie Mountain, challenges Maine’s gender identity housing policies that allow biological male convicts who identify as transgender women to be housed in women’s facilities.

The lawsuit centers on the terrifying actions of 28-year-old Andrea Balcer (born Andrew Balcer). In October 2016, at the age of 17, Balcer committed a horrific crime in Winthrop, Maine, stabbing both of his parents (Alice and Antonio Balcer) and the family’s chihuahua dog to death inside their family home. Balcer was convicted as an adult and sentenced in 2018 to serve 40 years in prison. Having transitioned to a female identity while incarcerated, corrections officials transferred this male double-murderer from the male population at the Maine State Prison to the female units at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.

Under this housing arrangement, Balcer gained direct, unmonitored access to female prisoners, many of whom are serving sentences for non-violent offenses such as drug charges. The newly filed court documents describe a living nightmare for the female inmates bunked with or housed near Balcer. The original plaintiff, Katie Mountain, was housed in the same cell as Balcer starting in January 2026. She alleges that Balcer subjected her to graphic sexual stories, trapped her in a bathroom, trapped her in a closet and forcibly kissed her, and made repeated threats of rape and impregnation.

The three women who joined the lawsuit on May 28 add even more chilling allegations of unwanted sexual contact, groping, indecent exposure, and graphic threats of violence. In her court filings, Michaela Sargent describes waking up in the dead of night to find Balcer standing over her bunk, silently stroking her hair. Balcer threatened her, stating, “if you don’t wake up it’s because I smothered you with a pillow.” On another occasion, Balcer grabbed Sargent’s shirt, demanding, “show me your boobs,” and later cornered her saying, “I want to lick your face.” Plaintiff Danielle Foster alleges that Balcer regularly stood entirely naked in her room while she slept and suggested she could “do things” to her in her sleep.

The lawsuit also details systemic retaliation by prison officials. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Cynthia Dill, revealed that when the female prisoners complained about the ongoing abuse, or when they refused to affirm Balcer’s transgender identity, prison administrators punished them. The female victims were subjected to retaliatory segregation (solitary confinement), stripped of privileges, denied hygiene supplies and medication, and threatened with the loss of eligibility for early release.

The plaintiffs are suing Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty and Maine Correctional Center Superintendent Joy Ryder, arguing that the department’s housing policy exhibits “deliberate indifference to the safety, privacy and civil rights of women incarcerated in the State of Maine.” They are seeking a permanent injunction to end the housing of biological males in female facilities, alongside damages for the severe psychological trauma they have suffered

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In October 2015, my ex-wife and I were campaigning for abortion reform in Ireland. The man driving us up the east coast from Dublin to Belfast was Colm O’Gorman. Sound man, brave man, I thought. Founder of One in Four and, of course, the face of Amnesty International in Ireland. I liked him enormously and considered him a friend.

But it was my wife who suffered the tragedy that put us in that man’s car. Her first pregnancy after we had begun to try had been diagnosed with a fatal foetal abnormality. Had she been in Ireland rather than London, the law would have forced her to carry the baby to term. She and I did a short film about it that went out under the Amnesty banner, and we were proud to be useful to a brand we considered one of unassailable goodness, much as my grandparents and parents once thought of the priesthood.

The next time I saw Colm O’Gorman, it was three years later. He was outside an RTÉ studio with a placard, protesting a five-minute interview I had given on the matter of women’s rights, which he had now decided he was against. By now, my marriage was failing, so I had no time to admire the elegance of his method. Pre-cancellation, he had used my wife and me to burnish Amnesty’s feminist credentials. Post-cancellation, he used my notoriety to help destroy women’s rights in Ireland.

The institution he served has run Ireland’s gender politics ever since. Amnesty Ireland did not merely consent to self-ID. It led the charge. It campaigned for the Gender Recognition Act of 2015, briefed politicians, told journalists what to think, and when the law passed it celebrated. The organisation that had once put my wife’s grief on a poster now used its authority to ensure that no Irish woman would be permitted to object to a male in her ward, her cell, or her refuge. What we gave Amnesty was the down payment on a betrayal.

But Britain has just done something Ireland will not. On Thursday, more than a year after the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “woman” in the Equality Act means biological woman, the Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson finally laid the updated EHRC code of practice before Parliament. After a decade of being smeared, sacked, doxxed, arrested and dragged through the courts, women in Britain have a piece of paper that tells hospitals, schools, gyms and refuges what the law actually says. Single-sex means single-sex. A man with a certificate is still a man.

Terf Island held the line.

But this is a global war, and Britain is just one front. While we toast at home, women in other countries are still being sued, sacked, fined, deplatformed and prosecuted by their own states for the crime of saying men are men.

In Australia, the Federal Court has just told Sall Grover that her women’s app, Giggle, was obliged to admit a male who identifies into being a woman. Last week, on appeal, the court doubled her damages to twenty thousand dollars for the offence of running the app she built. In the same country, Kirralie Smith of Binary Australia has been ordered to pay $95,000 to two trans-identifying males whose names and faces she shared online while raising concerns about males playing women’s football in New South Wales. The penalty was handed down in December. She must also pin a public apology to them on every social media account she owns, for as long as she owns them.

In France, the journalist Dora Moutot was convicted on Wednesday and fined €4,500 for “public insult on account of gender identity.” Her crime was saying, on a late-night talk show in 2022, that women have reason to be wary of “people with penises.” She had been careful. In an effort to be polite she had used the phrase “people with penises”. The court ruled that by referring to people with penises as people with penises, she had reduced trans women to “their male attribute.” Her co-author Marguerite Stern, with whom she wrote the book Transmania, faces the same complaints from the same lawyers. The two of them have been driven from public events by mobs chanting “a TERF, a bullet, social justice.” Explosives were found near one of their signings. In 2026, in the country of Olympe de Gouges, a woman can be fined four and a half thousand euros for stating what every human being on earth knows.

In Canada, the nurse Amy Hamm has been in front of a professional tribunal for five years because in 2020 she chipped in for a Vancouver billboard that read “I ♥ J.K. Rowling.” The billboard lasted thirty hours before activists got it taken down. The BC College of Nurses and Midwives compiled a 332-page report on her tweets, articles and podcast appearances, found her guilty of unprofessional conduct in March of last year, suspended her nursing licence, and ordered her to pay nearly $94,000 in costs. Her employer fired her without severance. Robert Hoogland, also in British Columbia, was jailed in 2021 for contempt of court because he kept calling his teenage daughter his daughter, in interviews, in violation of an order requiring him to use male pronouns for her. A court had previously found that his use of the word “daughter” constituted “family violence.” He served months.

Countries went mad in a herd. They go sane one at a time. Britain is sane today, more or less. Australia, France and Canada are not. And then there’s Ireland.

Ireland has self-ID. Has had it since 2015, when the Gender Recognition Act was waved through with all the seriousness of a Father Ted raffle. Under that law, a man can sign a form and become a woman “for all purposes.” Including, it turns out, the purpose of being locked in a cell with frightened female prisoners.

Barbie Kardashian. Born Gabriel Alejandro Gentile. Fifteen previous convictions for violent crime. Told his social workers he wanted to torture his mother to death and prolong her suffering with boiling water and a screwdriver. Described the screams of a social worker whose eyelid he had ripped off as “music to my ears.” Signed his form. Got his certificate. The Irish state put him in Limerick women’s prison, When in prison, he picked up charges of threatening to kill and rape a female prison officer and a female inmate. He was acquitted but he admitted, at his trial, that he had made those threats. He’s out now. Two-year supervision order. Two years in which he can follow any Irish woman into a female-only space and only start breaking the law when he decides to kill her.

Nobody could say they weren’t warned. The people who designed the system simply chose not to imagine what it would look like once it was running.

And every Irish journalist who could have stopped it looked the other way. Start with Paddy Kielty, because he had the biggest platform and used it for nothing. He sits in Gay Byrne’s old chair, and, whatever else you might think of him, Byrne would have put a woman on the couch and let her talk. For all his biases, he had turned a light entertainment slot into a national forum, where morality, politics and religion got argued out in front of the country. He ambushed bishops on live television. In 1987, in the middle of the AIDS crisis, he held a condom up to the camera on RTÉ, called it “the dreaded object,” and showed the country how to use one. He understood that a chat show host’s job is sometimes to ask the question no one else will ask, with a polite smile and a tape recorder running. Kielty inherited that chair and that microphone and that audience, and on the most consequential women’s rights story of his lifetime, he has done nothing. Not a segment. Not an interview. Not a question. He has aped the rest of the Irish media establishment, which long ago decided that women complaining about men in their changing rooms was a story to be managed, not reported.

Then there’s Rory O’Neill, who performs as Panti Bliss. Ireland’s beloved drag queen and secular saint, who in 2014 gave a speech from the Abbey Theatre stage about Irish homophobia that was filmed, posted online, and turned into a viral video the country’s liberal class adopted as scripture. Most of what he said that night about homophobia was true and brave. The problem is what O’Neill did with his sudden surplus of cultural capital. Over the next few years, he spent it on destroying women’s sex-based rights in Ireland while calling it a continuation of his fight against homophobia. To question any of it was to declare oneself the sort of brute who would have booed him at the Abbey. That was the trick. It worked beautifully. It is still working.

And above them all, Leo Varadkar. The first openly gay Taoiseach. The man who, in office, called for a “respectful debate” about trans issues while ensuring that no such debate could be permitted to happen. Last October, marking the tenth anniversary of the Gender Recognition Act, Varadkar wrote in the Sunday Times that the law had been “a success” and had helped promote the idea that gender is a social construct. Anyone raising the alarm, he wrote, was a “nationalist and religious fundamentalist actor” busy “demonising and scapegoating” the vulnerable. That’s me, by the way. That’s the women in Limerick prison. That’s the parents helping their child through this violent new form of anorexia, glamourised by celebrities like Ellen Page. We are all religious fundamentalists now, according to the first gay Taoiseach, who has ensured that when the cost is counted, he may also be the last.

Varadkar has since moved on. He is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, running a project called “The Future of LGBTQI+ Rights in the European Union.” From there, on full salary, he exports Ireland’s experiment to the rest of the bloc and writes op-eds about how well it’s all going. At the time of this writing, Harvard has not sought out the women of Limerick prison for their thoughts.

Which brings us back to Colm O’Gorman, the man at the wheel. In 1999 he founded One in Four, the Irish charity that supports adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. He had been abused himself, by a priest called Sean Fortune, and he had the courage to say so on television at a time when Irish institutions still preferred their victims silent. He took on the Catholic Church and won. The Ferns Inquiry happened because of him. Children are safer in Ireland because of him.

That’s what makes the rest of it unbearable. The same man, having built a career on the principle that vulnerable people must not be silenced by the institutions meant to protect them, went on to run the Irish arm of Amnesty International while it lobbied for an ideology that did precisely that.

First, by ushering men into women’s wards, women’s prisons, women’s locker rooms. Second, by sending confused children, disproportionately girls, gay kids and the autistic, to clinics that medicated and operated on them in the name of an identity they’d announced in front of the wrong adult. Amnesty Ireland treated both as settled human rights, and treated anyone who objected as a bigot.

The cost has been particular for lesbians. A young woman who once would have come out and found a community now finds an ideology waiting that tells her she might really be a boy, and a dating scene in which declining male-bodied partners is treated as transphobia. Irish lesbians lost their bars and most of their younger generation in one go.

I’m writing all this as someone who’s spent the last decade being told by Irish friends, Irish colleagues, Irish acquaintances and Irish strangers that I had lost my mind. That I was punching down. That I needed help. None of them have apologised. That’s fine. An apology from people who said nothing as my world caved in isn’t worth having. I just need to know my sister and mum are safe, and my daughter when she visits them. I once worked with Colm O’Gorman because I thought we were making Ireland safer for women. Now I’ll never stop fighting men like him for the same reason.

Ireland is on the same road as France. The hate speech provisions were beaten back in 2024, but the hate crime law passed, and the Minister has promised the speech ban will be back. The Gender Recognition Act is still in force. The HSE is drawing up a new ‘model of care’ for gender services in consultation with TENI. Irish children are still being referred to clinics in the UK. The schools still teach the gospel according to TENI. The journalists still won’t ask the right questions. And the women, as ever, are expected to shut up, use the cubicle marked ‘all genders,’ and hope for the best.

Irish feminists already know the assignment, but we need the men who know something is wrong but are keeping their mouths shut for a quiet life. We need the journalists who went along with it, and have begun in the small hours to wonder. We need the parents who watched their daughter come home from school talking about being a boy and felt the floor go. You are not bigots for asking questions. You are the country, and you are the tide that needs to turn. Don’t wait for your friends. Your friends aren’t coming. Nail your courage to the mast.

Repeal the Gender Recognition Act. Get men out of women’s shelters, changing rooms, toilets and sports. Put every last male prisoner back in a male prison where he belongs. Get the ideology out of the schools. Tell the HSE the experiment is over. Tell RTÉ to do its job. Tell Amnesty Ireland that the women in Limerick prison are prisoners of conscience now, and Amnesty put them there.

You’ll be smeared. You’ll be sacked. You’ll be charged. We’ve all been through it. It passes. The truth does what the truth does, which is wait everyone out.

Because of the feminist resistance in the UK, Terf Island is now safer for women.

Ireland next.

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This afternoon on the 15 May 2026 in the Federal Court in Sydney three Justices Melissa Perry, Wendy Abraham and Geoffrey Kennett delivered what can only be described as a gut punch to every Australian female.

Sall Grover’s appeal of the original Tickle v Giggle 2024 case was set aside this afternoon by the Federal Court Justices. The court found Grover guilty of direct discrimination and fined her $20,000 and ordered her to pay an additional $100,000 in court costs as well as her own legal fees. The full judgement can be found here.

But in summary the Federal Court ruled that men can be women and that Australian women do not deserve the protections of single-sex spaces, fair sports, or protection from men in domestic violence shelters or prisons as well as upholding the Orwellian inversion that men can now be lesbians. While there are legal complexities regarding clauses, terminology, precedent and arguments Australian women don’t care.

The law is an arse.

The law is a lie.

The law hates women.

Here’s a taster of some of the most colourful judicial gaslighting in history:

“The full court has found that Giggle For Girls and Ms Grover both excluded Ms Tickle from the Giggle app and refused to re-admit her on the basis of her gender-related appearance by reference to her selfie. This amounted to direct discrimination by reference to a characteristic that pertains to people of Ms Tickle’s gender identity, being a transgender woman.”

Justice Perry’s wording transforms women setting boundaries and turns it into bigotry against “transgender women”. This is not just absurd but a complete inversion of the original purpose of the Sex Discrimination Act, which was meant to protect women as a sex class.

The rights of Australian women’s have been dismantled under the cover of darkness. There was no public consultation, no debate, no warning and changes to the SDA were made in the dying days of the government.

The Australian government spent $80 - $122 million of taxpayer funds plus tens of millions campaigning to engage the public on same sex marriage. The Voice to Parliament cost the Australian taxpayer over $350 – 400 million. Gender identity reforms received not a single penny. Nada. Zilch.

This is the Denton’s playbook that recommends keeping a low profile, avoiding public debate or media scrutiny and bundling gender recognition with more popular reforms to create a veil of protection. Today is one of the final moves in a chess game started long ago. The imposition of a social order chosen for us, imposed on us but never agreed by us.

Since the Gillard Labor government amended the SDA in 2013 to include the nebulous, subjective, metaphysical concept of gender identity, the entire Australian political class, liberal media, NGOs and major institutions have chosen lies over truth, men’s feelings over women’s reality and men’s entitlement over women’s safety.

The Treachery of Women

Yes. I’ve heard it all before; this is about male fetishism, this is about male entitlement, this is about men’s use of sissy porn. I get it. There is some truth to this. But what’s equally true is this simply could never happen without the deep treachery of other women; elite, powerful “progressive” women have their fingerprints all over this.

Too many “progressive” women have shown themselves not only to be willing, but to be enthusiastic participants in prioritising gender identity over sex-based protections.

I will leave the wordsmithing of this to one of the greatest female writes of today when J.K Rowling recently posted:

What’s Next?

Sall Grover said she will appeal this to the High Court, but that will depend on whether the High Court allows the appeal.

Apart from the One Nation political party, not one Australian party has a policy to amend the SDA and restore women’s rights. Just think about that. Women’s rights have been abandoned for men’s delusions. Do not forget that this is a one-way street because there is not a single story in which a woman who identifies as a man has stolen a man’s sporting trophy, or raped a man while incarcerated in a male prison or sexually abused their daughter and been let off by the judge because she is “trans” and therefore more vulnerable. Not one. Anywhere.

Trans ideology entered via the Trojan Horse of the gay rights movement and is funded by billionaires including the Pritzkers, Rothblatt, Soros and many others.

Gender ideology has been wrapped in rainbow and glitter marketing by poster boys for social progress like Barak Obama and feminist poster girls like Julia Gillard, Jacinta Arden and Nicola Sturgeon; all professing their socially progressive bona fides onto an unsuspecting public and normalised by the liberal media that routinely fails in their journalistic responsibility to cover both sides of the debate on “rights.”

Today’s decision is devastating but not surprising. The imposition of gender identity ideology is a well-funded marketing campaign to fundamentally change reality. There are many winners in this game - politicians who can appeal to the ideologically captured ‘youth’ who have been taught gender ideology in schools, Big Pharma with a steady stream of lifelong patients and a burgeoning surrogacy and porn industry in which “trans” is by far the most popular category

But this story is not over. Sall Grover will appeal the decision to the High Court.

Stay tuned.

Sall Grover's costs have increased to around $120,000. Please consider supporting her crowdfunding here.

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Hi everyone! This is the text of a petition which you can sign here. Wherever you stand on the conflict in Gaza, I hope we can all agree that Ted and Dougal shouldn’t be dragged into it.

My name is Graham Linehan. I am the co-creator of Father Ted, one of the most beloved Irish television comedies ever made. I am writing this petition with anger, and with grief — for what RTÉ has become, and for what it is doing to Ireland’s reputation.

RTÉ has chosen to boycott the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest solely because Israel is participating. This is not a principled humanitarian stand. It is antisemitism — the oldest hatred — dressed up in the language of human rights. Singling out the world’s only Jewish state for exclusion, while no such standard is applied to any other nation, meets the internationally recognised IHRA definition of antisemitism. RTÉ has not boycotted Russia, Belarus, or Azerbaijan. It has boycotted Israel. The message is clear.

To compound this disgrace, RTÉ has chosen to fill the Eurovision slot on Saturday night with my show — the Father Ted Eurovision episode, “A Song for Europe” — as an act of pointed, gleeful counter-programming. I did not give my permission for Father Ted to be used as a prop in an antisemitic political gesture. I object to it in the strongest possible terms.

This is not the Ireland I know. This is not the Ireland that gave Father Ted to the world. RTÉ’s institutional antisemitism is poisoning Irish public life, normalising Jew-hatred under the guise of solidarity, and it must be confronted.

We, the undersigned, demand:

1. That RTÉ Director General Kevin Bakhurst resign immediately, or be dismissed by the RTÉ Board and the Irish Government.

2. That RTÉ issue a full and unreserved apology for its decision to boycott Eurovision on antisemitic grounds.

3. That the Irish Minister for Media launch an independent review of antisemitism within RTÉ’s editorial decision-making.

Ireland is better than this. RTÉ must be held accountable.

Graham Linehan
Co-creator, Father Ted

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“Who radicalised you?” is something we TERFs and TERF allies hear a lot. The question takes for granted that the radicalised parties are us, and not the people who believe men can become women by saying so, that children are born in the wrong body, and that men belong in women’s changing rooms, shelters and sports.

Still, I’ll take the question on its own terms. I’m not sure I can safely say any one person was responsible. The one who looms largest is Magdalen Berns. Her wit, her pugnacious energy, her empathy, her sorrow at lesbians losing their spaces. I had the honour of meeting her in the last few weeks of her life, and that’s probably part of why she’s stayed so vivid.

Others shaped me and went quietly back to their own lives, and the fight has been hectic enough that I haven’t stopped to give them their due. A social worker called Lisa Muggeridge is one of those people. I’m only realising now, going back through it, how much of what I think and how I think came from a single video of hers.

This was 2018. Jess Bradley, the NUS’s first trans officer, had just been suspended for sharing workplace dick pics while Aimee Challenor, it would shortly emerge, shared a nappy fetish with his paedophile father. I knew there was something terribly wrong with this so-called civil rights movement and I wanted to understand what.

Lisa was an early voice who didn’t generate much chatter at the time. She vanished from the fight not long after. I assume she went quiet to protect her family, who were already being targeted by trans activists. I don’t blame her, and I’ll always be grateful that she gave me what I needed. A lens, like the shades that opened Rowdy Roddy Piper’s third eye in John Carpenter’s They Live. The lens was the word “grooming”.

The short video opens with a memory from her first week of social work training. The lecturer told a room of seventy students to look around. Two or three of their fellow students, he said, were there to gain access to vulnerable children. He wasn’t speculating. He was showing them what they were up against. Every workplace those students entered for the rest of their careers would contain the same percentage, and the predators, the lecturer warned them, would be the most charming, the most popular, the most successful in the room.

I immediately realised it was true. Obvious, even. The Catholic Church didn’t attract paedophiles because Catholics are evil people. Quite the opposite. Catholics were trusting and open, and they hadn’t been given the speech that Lisa was given.

It takes a village to enable a predator, and when Lisa made her video many of the UK’s institutions had already been captured by the fashionable virus that allowed men into women’s spaces. The police, the prison service, the civil service, the education system, and most horrifically of all social work itself had fallen. Frontline safeguarding professionals like Lisa know what predators look like. Elite institutions don’t, and they own the keys to the kingdom. The least plausible of them swanned past every door, because every door had already been propped open. The visibly autistic Aimee Challenor wasn’t charming by any measure, but Oxford gave him a speaking gig, the Mayor of London removed “ladies and gentlemen” from tube announcements on his orders, and the Guardian (among other left-wing news titles) greased his entry into polite society.

This is what I want people who use the word “radicalised” about me to understand. We weren’t radicalised. We were the people who hadn’t been groomed. Lisa Muggeridge handed me the glasses and I put them on, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to thank her properly.

“So I wanted to talk about a conversation that was had with my group in our first week of social work training. We had registered at university. We had started. We were all very, very eager to learn.

There was a lecture, I think it’s actually the core module, the actual social work theory lecture, where a very middle class woman …the lecturer had mentioned the word “normal”, and she thought she was being a smart arse, this one, and she said, “What’s normal anyway?” The lecturer fixed her with a look and said, “Your job from now on is to have a very, very, very clear grasp of what is normal and what is abnormal and what is within the range of normal, because you are going to be making decisions on that basis. And if you do not have that ability, you are on the wrong course.”

She was put in her place.

In the same lecture, we were told to look around the room. There were many of us. I have in my head that there were 70 students that year, but I might be wrong. I could be very wrong, it was some time ago.

We were told to look around the room and understand that at least one person, possibly two, possibly three, in that room were there to train as social workers with the sole aim of getting access to vulnerable children.

We were told to understand that in every office, in every environment we ever worked in, we were working with the most vulnerable children in the country, and that the only way we could mitigate the harm the system did was if we recognised that a percentage of our colleagues, colleagues we trusted, colleagues we liked, colleagues who were successful, around us, were there to get access to vulnerable children.

And that we must assume in every environment, in every institution, that this is the case. Those people may be the most popular, the nicest, the most charming. In fact they’re highly likely to be the most popular, the nicest, the most charming. They are highly likely to be the person who spends a great deal of time projecting an image of themselves as good and working with vulnerable children. And we knew this to be true.

This is the basis of all safeguarding in the UK. The reason we know this is because before my generation had looked after children, it was the norm that children were never, ever, ever believed. My generation (was) the first generation where we said they will be listened to. That this is the rule of law, and that rule of law is there to protect you. We recognise that within that protection, we do not have that ability often. So we (must) recognise that people will do this. This is not unknown. This is not even remotely contested. This is at the core of safeguarding, the core of health, the core of education.

The place where they do not know this is elite institutions.

The Guardian do not know this. I want you to watch the Guardian and every narrative they pull about this, because even if it turns out tomorrow that children have already been harmed by this ideology, and it already is clear that many children have been harmed by this ideology,

The Guardian will protect identity, and they will unleash abuse on anybody who threatens that identity. I want you to watch how they do that. Go back to that video in the playlist about protection of identity and how it generates crisis. Watch that process with the institutions who have pushed this, as it becomes apparent how much harm it has caused.

It is abundantly clear that the campaign around Roz Kaveney, Jess Bradley, Aimee Challenor and others was a direct and concerted attempt to undermine equality frameworks, to dilute and undermine safeguarding. It was directly about getting access to children for many of the people with this. We know this predatory behaviour occours. It’s not a race issue. It’s not a class issue. The occurrence is roughly universal. This is the baseline. There will always be a streak of extremely predatory people who are motivated by paraphilia, which is not a normal sexuality, not a normal sexual desire, but one driven by compulsion and often causing harm to others.

We know that this is the case. Everybody on the ground knows this. What has become apparent through the use of the word “TERF” and the promotion of this ideology is that institutions are not aware of this. We do not expose children to risk because elite institutions are not aware of the systems they are the political voice for.

I wanted to share with you that actually we do know and we do understand this, and I wanted to share with you how distinctive it was that those elite institutions do not.

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The original This Never Happens documented 236 cases of trans-identified males — biological men — committing acts of violence, sexual assault, and predation against women and children. My colleague JL built and maintained that list for years. When she stopped, the cases didn’t.

The phrase “this never happens” is what we are told when we raise the subject of male violence against women in the context of gender self-identification. It is what we are told when we point out that prisons, shelters, hospital wards, and changing rooms — spaces that exist specifically because of the reality of male violence — are being opened up to any man who states a belief that he is a woman. It never happens, we are assured. You are a bigot for suggesting it might. You are a transphobe for demanding evidence. You are hateful, hysterical for noticing patterns that any police database could confirm in an afternoon.

It happens. It happens every week.

This is an ongoing series. Each entry is documented, sourced, and as detailed as the available reporting allows. I have also noted, in every case, how the publications covering these crimes chose to refer to the perpetrator — whether they used male or female pronouns, and what that choice conceals or reveals. Language matters. When a man who has raped a nine-year-old girl is referred to throughout a news report as “she,” something is being done to the reader. I think you should know when that is happening.

Ciara Watkin

Ciara Watkin. Credit: Instagram / Terry Blackburn / BBC

Pronoun usage: The BBC used female pronouns throughout, referring to Watkin as “she” and “her” in every instance, consistent with BBC editorial policy. The CPS press release likewise used female pronouns: “prior to engaging in sexual activity with the victim, Watkin had made no attempt to inform him of her transgender status.” The victim himself, who said he “didn’t swing that way,” did not use female pronouns in his police statement. Neither the BBC nor CPS noted in their headlines that the perpetrator was biologically male.

Ciara Watkin, 21, a biological male from Thornaby, Stockton-on-Tees, was convicted on 22 August 2025 at Teesside Crown Court of two counts of sexual assault and one count of assault by penetration. Watkin had met the 21-year-old male victim on Snapchat, using a female cartoon character as a profile picture, before meeting in person. Over the course of several days in June 2022, Watkin performed sexual acts on the victim at a house in Thornaby. During these encounters, Watkin prevented the man from touching her below the waist by telling him she was on her period — a deliberate deception to conceal her male genitalia. The sexual activity continued over multiple occasions, including at the victim’s own home. Watkin had not undergone any medical treatment or surgery and had used the name Ciara since the age of 13. After the encounters, Watkin initially blocked all contact with the man, then eventually revealed via text message that she was transgender and had male genitalia. The man immediately filed a complaint with police, stating he would not have met Watkin had he known, as he did “not swing that way.” Prosecutors argued the case turned on “informed consent” — that without knowledge of the perpetrator’s biological sex, genuine consent to sexual activity was impossible. The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for approximately one hour before convicting on all counts. Sentencing was set for 10 October 2025. The judge noted that imprisonment was possible. Watkin was placed on the sex offenders register immediately following conviction. The CPS’s Senior Crown Prosecutor, Sarah Nelson, said the assaults had had “a significant impact on the victim’s mental wellbeing.” (UK)

Solomon Galligan (also known as Carmen Galligan)

Solomon Galligan. Credit: Aurora Police Department / NY Post

Pronoun usage: The New York Post used male pronouns and the birth name Solomon throughout, while noting that Galligan “now reportedly goes by Carmen.” The Post referred to Galligan as “he” and “him” in all instances. Local Colorado outlets such as 9News were more inconsistent, sometimes using female pronouns in line with Galligan’s stated identity. The prosecuting assistant DA referred to Galligan using the female name “she” during court proceedings, per local reporting.

Solomon Galligan, 33, a registered sex offender who had adopted the name Carmen and identified as a woman, attempted to snatch an 11-year-old boy during recess at Black Forest Hills Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado in April 2024. Security camera footage captured the moment Galligan approached the child. Galligan had a documented history of serious mental illness and had cycled repeatedly through Colorado’s criminal and civil justice systems. After his arrest, Galligan was assessed by doctors and found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. In August 2025, charges were formally dismissed after evaluators determined Galligan could not be “restored” to competency — meaning, under a 2024 amendment to Colorado’s competency law, the judge had no choice but to drop the case entirely. The prosecuting assistant DA, Ryan Brackley, said publicly: “Someone could ask that she be put into a more long-term, secure facility, but because the criminal case had to be dismissed, that’s not something that we have any control over anymore. And that’s why we find the statute deficient.” Galligan’s own defence attorney called Colorado’s criminal justice system “broken.” The DA’s office said Galligan was at a treatment centre and could only be released if a licensed professional certified he was no longer a threat — a safeguard that critics noted had already failed multiple times over Galligan’s history. The DA on the case subsequently faced a recall campaign over the handling of the matter.

Unnamed transgender illegal alien — child sex crimes charges, July 2025

Pronoun usage: The DHS press release used no pronouns, referring only to “a transgender illegal alien accused of child sex crimes.” Fox News, covering the same case, used male pronouns and described the perpetrator as a biological male. The individual’s name was not published in the July 2025 reporting, though DHS indicated criminal proceedings had formally commenced.

In July 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced that criminal proceedings had begun against a transgender-identifying illegal alien accused of child sex crimes — a case DHS described as among the “worst of the worst.” The individual had been residing in a US sanctuary city, which DHS said had initially shielded the perpetrator from federal immigration enforcement despite the active child sex crime allegations. The case was highlighted by DHS as an example of the dangers posed by sanctuary city policies preventing cooperation with ICE. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin stated that the individual had been scooped up by federal agents after local authorities declined to honour an immigration detainer. The nature of the specific child sex offences — and the number and ages of victims — was not published in full at the time of the July 2025 announcement, pending the ongoing criminal proceedings. Fox News reported that the individual had been described by law enforcement sources as posing a significant ongoing danger to children and that the case involved multiple alleged victims. The outcome of criminal proceedings was not yet reported as of the date of this entry.

Oliver Smith — January 2025 (UK)

Oliver Smith. Credit: Daily Mail

Pronoun usage: The Daily Mail noted Smith “uses they/them pronouns and suffers from gender issues” — and used they/them throughout the piece. Portsmouth Crown Court also used they/them. The victim’s parents, who watched the sentencing, were not reported to have used any particular pronouns.

Oliver Smith, 21, a biological male identifying as non-binary, was jailed for 12 years at Portsmouth Crown Court on 24 January 2025 after abducting and raping a 14-year-old girl at knifepoint as she walked to school in Bordon, Hampshire. Smith had lain in wait in woodland, scoped the attack location in advance, wore gloves to avoid leaving evidence, and brought a box-cutter knife. When the terrified schoolgirl tried to flee during the 45-minute assault, Smith grabbed her mouth to muffle her screams and threatened to stab her in the throat. Afterwards, Smith washed the victim in a river to destroy forensic evidence. Smith then fled 600 miles north to Scotland but was caught. The court heard Smith had a “deeply disturbing” manifesto and a pornography addiction. Crucially, just nine months before the rape, Smith had already been convicted of voyeurism and possessing child sexual abuse images — and had escaped a custodial sentence. The judge at Portsmouth Crown Court jailed Smith for 12 years. The victim’s parents watched the sentencing in person.

Richard Kenneth Cox — January 2025 (USA)

Richard Kenneth Cox. Credit: WJLA

Pronoun usage: WJLA used male pronouns throughout. The school district initially declined to comment on how it had allowed a life-registered sex offender access to a swimming pool used by children.

Richard Kenneth Cox, a Tier III sex offender required to remain on the sex offenders register for life, was arrested in January 2025 after exposing his genitals in the girls’ changing room at the Washington-Liberty High School swimming pool in Arlington, Virginia. Cox was charged with intentionally making an obscene display of his genitals in a public place and loitering within 100 feet of a school while prohibited from proximity to children. Court documents confirmed Cox identifies as transgender. Cox’s offending history spans decades: in 1992 he was convicted of knowingly exposing himself to minors after masturbating in front of a large group of children in a gymnasium, with his penis in his hand. In 2007 he was convicted of six counts of possessing obscene materials involving a minor. In 2021 he was convicted of failing to register as a sex offender. Despite this history, Cox was present at a school swimming facility where children were changing. Arlington County Public Schools did not immediately explain how this had been permitted to happen.

Scarlett Lee (born Scott Henwood) — June 2025 (UK)

Scarlett Lee. Credit: South Wales Police / Wales Online

Pronoun usage: Wales Online used female pronouns throughout, describing Lee as “she” and “her” in every instance, including in the headline. The judge’s remarks, as quoted, also used female pronouns. South Wales Police provided a custody photograph.

Scarlett Lee, 30, born Scott Henwood, a biological male from Wales, was sentenced to two years and four months imprisonment at Cardiff Crown Court on 3 June 2025 after being found in possession of a folder of animated images depicting child sexual abuse — and after breaching a Sexual Harm Prevention Order by accessing social media under a different name following gender transition. Lee had first been convicted of possessing prohibited images of a child in February 2024, receiving a community order and an SHPO. The reoffending was discovered by a support worker cleaning Lee’s room in supported accommodation, who noticed a sexual message on Lee’s phone. When the manager investigated further, Lee voluntarily showed her an animated sexual image on a computer. A police search of Lee’s electronic devices then found 80 images depicting child sexual abuse. Lee pleaded guilty to possession of prohibited images and breach of the SHPO. Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke told Lee: “You have no regard for orders made by the court. You have a persistent interest in child abuse images” and said Lee had “no or little realistic prospect of rehabilitation.”

Manfred Sperling (also known as Amanda Joy Cooper) — February 2026 (Canada)

Manfred Sperling, aka Amanda Joy Cooper. Credit: Canadian Inmates Connect / NY Post

Pronoun usage: The New York Post used male pronouns and the birth name Manfred Sperling throughout, while noting the female alias. The CBC, which originally broke the story, used female pronouns and the name Amanda Joy Cooper. Sperling’s lawyer used female pronouns in court. Corrections Canada’s own documents, as quoted, also used female pronouns.

Manfred Sperling, 58, a serial sex predator with a decades-long offending history, began a legal bid in February 2026 to be transferred to a Canadian women’s prison, now identifying as Amanda Joy Cooper. Sperling was first convicted of sexual assault at 19. After release, he embarked on a four-day sex assault spree: he grabbed a 12-year-old girl who was rollerblading in a Montreal mall parking lot by the neck and threatened to rape her, and sexually assaulted two women. A judge at the time described him as a man who “does not hesitate to use his strength, weight and size to control his victims.” He was declared a dangerous offender and sentenced for an indeterminate period. In his first year in prison, Sperling threatened to sexually assault and kill female prison staff, resulting in transfer to a super-maximum security men’s prison. He began identifying as a woman around 2020, and in 2024 underwent full gender reassignment surgery — funded entirely by Canadian taxpayers at an estimated cost of $30,000. Sperling now blames all his crimes on his “dead self.” Corrections Canada has so far rejected the transfer requests, noting Sperling’s history of “obsessive attachments” to female staff and assessing him as “a very high risk to the safety” of female inmates. Sperling went to federal court to challenge that decision.

Alexandra Stewart (born Alan Baker) — April 2026 (Scotland)

HMP Greenock, where Alexandra Stewart is held. Credit: Getty / BBC

Pronoun usage: The BBC used female pronouns throughout — “Stewart was jailed for the murder,” “she was held in a women’s unit.” The BBC noted the biological sex of the perpetrator — “a biological male who identifies as a woman” — while still using female pronouns consistently throughout the piece. The Scottish Prison Service declined to comment.

Alexandra Stewart, 38, born Alan Baker, a biological male serving a life sentence for murder, was charged with the sexual assault of a fellow inmate at HMP Greenock, Scotland’s only women’s prison, in April 2026. Stewart stabbed John Weir 16 times at his home in Bonhill, West Dunbartonshire in 2013 and was jailed for life. Despite this, Stewart was moved to a women’s unit at HMP Greenock in 2016, following a gender identity declaration, under Scottish Prison Service policy permitting risk-assessed placement of trans-identified males in the female estate. Stewart is thought to be one of only two trans-identified males currently held in Scotland’s female prison estate. In the year before the assault charge, Stewart had accused a fellow female prisoner of transphobia in a legal case — a case that was subsequently dismissed. Police Scotland confirmed a report had been submitted to the procurator fiscal over the sexual assault. The Scottish Prison Service said it was “inappropriate to comment on ongoing proceedings.” The case comes amid a legal challenge by For Women Scotland to the SPS’s policy on trans prisoners, following the UK Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that “woman” in the Equality Act means biological woman.

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I’ve been writing more than ever lately. For the first time in years, it’s creative work rather than journalism and I’m having a blast. But the scandals keep coming, whether I write about them or not. Another court case. Another safeguarding story. Another detransitioner telling her story, another woman arrested for a tweet, another person hounded out of a job. But it’s worth taking a breath to explain the Denton’s document to anyone new to the debate. It is part of the explanation for why all this madness is happening, and why it’s happening in the way that it’s happening.

Previously, I’ve pointed readers at Tish (@STILLTish), whose work on it is the definitive archive. What I’ve never done is write the short, plain-English explainer that a new reader actually needs. So here it is.

What is the Dentons document?

The formal title is Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth. It’s a 65-page report, published in November 2019 to coincide with Transgender Awareness Week. Which means that as you read this, it’s been sitting in plain view for more than six years.

Three organisations put it together.

Dentons, which describes itself as the world’s largest law firm by headcount, with around 20,000 staff across 80 countries.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news and information giant, which runs a pro bono legal clearinghouse called TrustLaw.

And IGLYO, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation, a network of 96 youth groups across the Council of Europe region.

The foreword made no claim to neutrality. It hoped the report would be, in its own phrasing, “a powerful tool for activists and NGOs” pushing for trans youth rights across Europe.

The report examined eight European countries: Norway, Malta, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Three of them (Norway, Malta and Belgium) were singled out as “good practice” models for the state of their laws. Ireland was singled out as a country moving very quickly in the right direction, and held up as the textbook case in how to get a self-ID law passed, (which it did in 2015, a fact that continues to take most Irish people by surprise despite having ostensibly voted for it.)

The advocacy half of the document is, at heart, a manual for passing unpopular laws. If the argument could be won in the open, most of its tactics wouldn’t be necessary.

Along with Beautiful Trouble, the activist handbook from which Antifa takes its inspiration, the Dentons document belongs to a genre. But where Beautiful Trouble is for the useful-idiot tier, the SUV drivers and the Eddington children, the Dentons document is Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s for the people who actually decide things. But the game is the same. Get a consensus, just don't tell anyone.

What did it tell lobbyists to do?

This is where the document earns its reputation. As you read the following, ask yourself this question. If you were running a civil rights movement you genuinely believed was on the ‘right side of history’, would you use these tactics?

Tie trans rights to a more popular cause.

The report described gender identity as “a more difficult issue to win public support for”, so the recommendation was to attach such laws to other reforms, same-sex marriage providing the dream opportunity in several cases. The wooden horse is dragged into Troy by democratic consent. The passengers inside it, not as much. As an example of how to run a campaign to pass one of these laws, Ireland was the report’s favourite. The 2015 self-ID law passed in the afterglow of the marriage equality referendum, which, in the report’s own phrase, provided “a veil of protection”. The Irish public overwhelmingly supported marriage equality. On gender identity, their views were never sought.

Avoid the media

“...many believe that public campaigning has been detrimental to progress, as much of the general public is not well informed about trans issues, and therefore misinterpretation can arise.”

“In Ireland, activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum in order to avoid this issue.”

The positions are indefensible. So the document instructs its campaigners never to defend them in public. And yet the trans movement is, by some measures, the fastest-growing civil rights movement in modern history.

What the authors call misinterpretation is, in ordinary democratic terms, the public hearing about a proposed law and forming a view on it. The report treats that as the problem to be solved.

In the years since publication, this logic has hardened in the UK activist scene into the slogan “no debate”. In practice, it means more than avoiding journalists. It means preventing the debate from occurring at all. Trans activists and ‘allies’ refuse to appear on any panel or in any interview alongside a person who disagrees with them. The BBC, trapped by its easily-hacked tradition of offering balance, responds by dropping the segment entirely. The gender-critical voice doesn’t get aired. The activist voice doesn’t get challenged. The viewer hears nothing and therefore thinks the debate isn’t happening.

On the rare occasions when activists are questioned, the reason the document recommended avoiding the media in the first place becomes visible. The positions don’t survive scrutiny.

And when activists refuse a platform, they try to deny it to others. The deliberate no-platforming of Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce, two of the most consequential feminist voices of the last decade, is not a side effect of this tactic. It is the tactic.

Downplay the radical nature of your movement

Activists were told to present self-ID to the public as a bureaucratic reform. A matter of paperwork, nothing to do with medicine. Elsewhere in the same document, the authors set out what they actually wanted: medical transition available on demand, no diagnosis required, no gatekeeping of any kind. In the famous sit-down between Ruth Hunt and a simpering Owen Jones, all this they waved away as “admin”.

Brand the opposition as bigots

Women raising safeguarding concerns about prisons, wards, refuges and changing rooms were characterised throughout as TERFs. Across 65 pages, the authors gave feminist concerns roughly two sentences, summarised essentially as fretfulness about toilets. No engagement with the substance. No acknowledgement that a prison officer, a rape crisis worker, or a mother with a teenage daughter might have something to say. A slur, deployed early, designed to mark the argument as unfit to be heard.

Woo younger politicians

Activists were advised to win over the youth wings of political parties. Main wings tend to listen to their younger counterparts, and framing trans reform as getting on, in the document’s own phrase, “the right side of history” made it a hard thing for senior colleagues to oppose. That particular phrase has since become a cliché of this debate and one wonders, looking at it sitting here as a recommended tactical line, how much of its saturation of the conversation traces back to these pages. Which is then what happened, in party after party, in country after country. This tactic reached its apotheosis when Politics Joe got Mary Black to call rape victims and other women who needed single-sex spaces ‘Jeremy Hunts’ (rhyming slang for ‘cunts’).

Court sentiment, avoid scrutiny.

The one kind of press the report welcomed was sympathetic personal profiles of trans individuals. Malta was flagged as a successful case. Anonymised dramatisations, TV plays based on “real stories”, were recommended because the real stories, put honestly in front of a viewer, weren’t persuading anyone.

This is why so much of the promotion of trans ideology was handed over to storytellers, screenwriters and celebrities rather than to journalists or clinicians. The truth was unpalatable. Fiction could soften it. The textbook UK case is Butterfly, the ITV drama from 2018 starring Anna Friel. Its lead consultant was the monstrous Susie Green, then head of Mermaids, and the plot was a lightly fictionalised version of Green’s own story with her son, whom she flew to Thailand to be castrated on the day of his sixteenth birthday, the earliest moment the law there would allow. Three prime-time episodes, beautifully acted, beautifully shot, complete with Mermaids branding in the set dressing, all of in service of a homophobic child-mutilation racket. God only knows how many other kids have been harmed since it aired almost a decade ago.

Get ahead of the government, and the media story.

“There is a real risk that where advocates fail to intervene early, sensitizing the media and the public to trans rights in general and legal gender recognition in particular, persistent negative and pernicious narratives about the trans rights agenda may take hold in the public imagination which will negatively influence the legislative process and the prospects for success.”

Activists were advised to publish their preferred legislation before the government had even begun drafting its own, so the government’s starting point was already the activist’s destination. The same logic was applied to the press. Get the framing in early, before the public formed an opinion they didn’t like.

What it wanted the law to say

Alongside the tactics was a vision of the ideal legal regime.

Legal sex-change recognition by self-declaration alone. No medical diagnosis, no psychological assessment, no court involvement, no waiting period.

No minimum age. Children as well as adults should be able to change their legal sex by declaration.

Parental authorisation removed. And from the section of the report titled “Right to development of the child”:

“States should take action against parents who are obstructing the free development of a young trans person’s identity in refusing to give parental authorization when required.”

No eligibility criteria at all for the medical procedures the report calls “gender confirmation” treatments. No requirement to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria first.

The sum of these proposals is this: an eleven-year-old could change her legal sex without her parents’ knowledge, and if they tried to intervene, the state could come for them.

The smoking gun.

If the Dentons document is a smoking gun, it’s one that’s still in the hand of the shooter, with plenty more rounds in the chamber. The public didn’t get a say in this attempt at social engineering by stealth but they continue to pay the price, as the cases of Sandie Peggie, Jennifer Melle and the Darlington nurses prove.

Two things to bear in mind.

The first is that the legislative pattern the report described had already played out. Denmark in 2014. Malta in April 2015. Ireland in July 2015. Norway in 2016. Belgium in 2017. Portugal in 2018. All of it before the document was even published. A country a year, with barely a headline between them. By 2019 Dentons was simply writing down what had worked multiple times already. Since its publication, Spain adopted self-ID in 2023, Germany in 2024. Scotland tried, and only stalled when the press and the public finally paid attention, which is precisely the outcome the document was written to prevent.

The second is the behaviour of Dentons itself once light was shone on the thing. The distancing was built in from the start. Having produced the document between them, the firm and the Foundation were careful to note in a disclaimer on page four that it represented the views of neither. Then, once the critical coverage hit in late 2019, the report and its launch press release quietly disappeared from the firm’s own website. The Law Gazette‘s Obiter column noted the scrubbing at the time. When the industry blog RollOnFriday asked for comment, Dentons first offered up its Director of Pro Bono for interview, then asked for written questions, then couldn’t find anyone willing to answer them, and finally ended up cowering behind a general statement.

A law firm with 20,000 staff, together with a global media foundation, produced strategic advice for a transnational activist network on how to push child-level legal reforms through national legislatures while keeping the public out of the conversation. Then, once noticed, scrubbed the evidence from its own site.

The Dentons document is a playbook for institutions, but its lessons have trickled down to the individual level. Look how trans activists always cover their faces with signs or masks, and do everything in their power to stop people filming the protests they themselves have initiated. Their placards are not meant to be seen. They’re used to block cameras, and prevent others from seeing. Every trans scandal plays out in full view. The panicked scramble only begins when the general public notices it. Munroe Bergdorf posed for nude magazine spreads, proudly and publicly, for years. The day he was appointed safeguarding ambassador for a children’s charity, the Times flagged them, and the public learned that Bergdorf was not a transsexual but a fully intact male. The photographs had been there all along, so Bergdorf and his defenders implied there was something wrong with the noticing of the photographs.

This is a movement that advances in silence and stealth, while celebrities provide the memorised talking points that pass for opinions.

Silence, stealth, and propaganda. A genuine civil rights movement, rooted in moral conviction, would not need any of these. It doesn’t need to avoid journalists, brand its critics, recruit young politicians to pressure their seniors, commission prime-time dramas to sell its snake-oil, or instruct its campaigners never to defend their positions in public. It doesn’t need any of that, because a genuine civil rights movement wants the public to grasp the issue.

Regardless of what comes next, the document’s string of successes across the Western world makes it the most successful psy-op since that horse outside Troy. The challenge now will be to ensure it never happens again. Not only do we have to deprogram the part of ourselves that let the horse through the gates, we have to stop thinking of huge wooden horses bearing unpleasant surprises as an acceptable gift at all.

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One small step for lesbians, one giant step for womankind.

The Lesbian Action Group win their appeal in the Federal Court of Australia.

Nicole Mowbray and members of LAG outside the Federal Court

Finally - one small chink in the state-mandated imposition of gender identity ideology in Australia.

Federal Court Justice, Mark Moshinsky provided a pause in a top-down legal onslaught to compel lesbians (and all Australian women), to give up their right to single sex spaces. Here’s a summary of the previous legal cases that led to today’s judgement:

Round one: In 2023 LAG applied to the AHRC for a temporary exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA)1984 to hold public events for “lesbians born female.” The AHRC refused.

Round two: LAG appealed the AHRC’s decision to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) in January 2025. The ART upheld the AHRC’s refusal.

Round Three: LAG appealed to the Federal Court on 23–24 February 2026.

Step in Victoria’s Federal Court Justice Mark Moshinsky. You might think of Moshinsky as the final authority asked to review an umpire’s decision in a sporting match who found the umpire made the wrong call because he failed to apply the correct rules.

Justice Moshinsky set aside the decision of the ART because he found it wrongly held that exemptions under the SDA cannot be made that “endorse overt acts of discrimination”. This is nonsense. The purpose of the SDA is to discriminate for women on the basis of biological sex and the provision of granting an exemption is to balance the rights of different groups.

Safety for women in domestic violence shelters, women’s prisons and fairness in women’s sports are codified in law the SDA that specifically allows excluding men in these contexts. But of course, we all know this. And so does the AHRC, Moshinsky and every Australian who is not ideologically captured by the lie that sex is changeable and men can become women.

Lesbians are same sex attracted, take away sex and you take away homosexuality. The AHRC expects lesbians to either go underground or include men in their spaces, dating pools and events. LAG has heard from many young lesbians who experience shaming, bullying and exclusion for insisting on their boundaries. This is state-sanctioned homophobia.

The second legal error found by Justice Moshinsky was the tribunal’s failure to take into account that human rights are indivisible, and universal and every person is free and equal in dignity and rights - women’s rights should not be put aside for “trans rights.”

The Gillard Betrayal

When the Labor government under Julia Gillard amended the SDA to include “gender identity”, she fired the starting gun on a radical progressive political project to “queer” the world. Gillard may not have foreseen the profound impact this would have, but she has refused to acknowledge its real-world impact.

Activist commissioner Anna Cody made clear her promotion of queer theory in law when she said in a Senate Estimates hearing in December 2025:

“The Sex Discrimination Act does not define man or woman. It has an inclusive definition of women that includes all women, First Nations women, women from culturally and racially marginalised backgrounds, trans women, lesbians, and women with disability.”

Under Cody, the AHRC’s vision is that of citizens who live in an interlocking system of power relations, and men and women are replaced by a matrix of different genders or other intersecting identity groups.

This approach undermines the liberal principle that all citizens are equal under the law, regardless of personal characteristics. It implies rights should be adjudicated on an individual’s position within the matrix. In Cody-world, men who identify as women are more oppressed and deserve additional protections from the state.

But on 15 April, Federal Court Justice Moshinsky weighed in on the side of observable truths, biological reality and sex-based rights in ruling that gender identity rights do not override women’s.

Heather Corkhill, the legal director of Equality Australia responded to the Court’s decision and said:

“The court has not endorsed discrimination against trans women, and it has not decided whether the exemption should be granted. It has simply identified legal errors in the tribunal’s reasoning, so the matter must now be reconsidered.”

This is a characteristic sleight of mouth centring men’s rights and framing women’s right to boundaries as “discriminatory”.

A more factual summary of the ruling might be:

The court has not endorsed discrimination against women by an ideology that erases biological reality on which women’s rights are based. The court identified significant legal errors. The ART faied to balance the rights of lesbians to be afforded freedom of association, protection against male predation and to acknowledge their same-sex attraction.

But genderism has always been a maximalist ideology - in every situation where activists demand their “rights” they insist on both preserving and crossing the sex binary in one direction only. No Australian woman has ever demanded the right to enter male prisons, spaces or sports.

Following the judgement, Nicole Mowbray from LAG said:

“It’s an important step for lesbian rights to recognise that sex-based rights are separate from gender-based rights and that this is recognised in the SDA. Rather than seeking to balance these rights, the AHRC has used taxpayer funding to not only fight LAG but to actively discriminate against them. This should be a huge concern to all Australians. That a taxpayer funded Government department is actively discriminating against Australian citizens, when their mandate is clearly to do the opposite.

We have received messages of support from across the world, and we want to thank everyone for supporting us. It means so much and we wouldn’t have been able to get this far without all our amazing supporters. Thank you!”

What’s Next?

We are still waiting for the Australian Federal Court’s decision in the Giggle v Tickle appeal case in which Sall Grover was found guilty of discriminating against a trans identified man by excluding him from her women-only app.

It’s been over eight months.

The Australian Full Court Justices will be aware of Moshinsky’s ruling in the LAG case, whether they take this into account is yet to be seen.

Stay tuned!

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The real thing isn’t that much better.

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Entering the foyer of the King’s Head Theatre, I am greeted by a huge, vertical “Progress” flag on the wall. The sickly pink and blue chevron at the top, pointing down at the rainbow pride colours which are hidden behind high tables and stools. A slight, young usherette with a pixie haircut similar to my own unsmilingly asks me if I am here to see “Rowling In It”, I am indeed.

Earlier in the day, I had received an email from the theatre telling me that “KHT is an LGBTQ-centred venue, and all are welcome, however you identify.” I clicked on the link to their “Visitor Code of Conduct” and the first paragraph was a terse warning against engaging in any sort of discrimination towards “LGBTQIA+ individuals”. I read on, and found no defensive warnings issued regarding any other marginalised groups; women, for example, or disabled people. Presumably, you can treat them in any way you like.

Laura Kay Bailey, a Texan woman in her mid-forties, is the writer/performer of this new one-woman show, “Rowling In It”. She stands on stage armed with a water bottle and the script of “Terf”, the play in which she played JK Rowling in 2024, and her woefully underwritten story begins.

Joshua Kaplan’s play ‘Terf’ (originally entitled ‘Cunt’) was performed at the Assembly Rooms, a coveted venue at the competitive Edinburgh Fringe festival two years ago. The play imagines Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rupert Grint (the child actors from Harry Potter) staging an intervention with Rowling about her Twitter posts on women’s rights. Reviews at the time were mixed but Starburst Magazine called it “a clear protest against the rise of transphobia in the UK”.

Bailey bears the most passing resemblance to Rowling, but aids our imaginative leap with the donning of the auburn wig she wore in “Terf”, whipping it on and off as she goes in and out of the character.

The actress’s racist Texan grandmother was her starting point for delving into the character of Rowling, because she was “tough” and “refused to change”. The comparison seems to begin and end there. Given that Rowling is not just a character in a play but also a real person, one might think that Rowling herself would be the starting point for an actress tasked with playing her. Instead, Bailey has already decided that Rowling is “bigoted” and so is using another bigoted woman in her life as her reference. The extent of Bailey’s research appears to be perusing Rowling’s Twitter page where she found a woman “defending a version of reality that doesn’t quite match what’s happening on the ground.”

At no point does Bailey explain what specific position of Rowling's drove her to this comparison. The audience is simply asked to take 'bigoted' on faith."

She never goes into what she means by this, nor does she share any of the tweets she’s referencing. Instead, she moves quickly on to telling us how fraught the play’s rehearsal process is, with constant script changes, and a grumpy ‘transwoman’ actor whose part is eventually whittled down to almost nothing.

Kaplan and the cast of “Terf” have a WhatsApp group charmingly called “The Cuntservatoire”, whose edited conversations are projected onto a screen behind Bailey. They mostly discuss their irritation with Kaplan’s script changes, the lack of feedback they are getting on their performances, and where best to source ketamine in Edinburgh. Kaplan refers to himself as “Mummy”. So far, so fringe.

Bailey arrives at rehearsals one day and the cast are deep in a discussion about the perennial subject of toilets, all of them agreeing that women should be comfortable to share a space with men in this context. Bailey claims to hate discussing this subject, finding it repetitive, but tells us she doesn’t particularly like gender neutral bathrooms because she doesn’t want “some 25-year-old dude” to hear her pee. However, she decides this is an insufficient reason to protect women’s spaces, and sums up her thoughts on the topic as “if you know how to wipe the seat, come on in.” There is an underlying assumption that all reasonable women feel this way and no interrogation of opposing views. End of discussion. Of course, it’s not even the beginning of the discussion, as Rowling's actual published arguments on single-sex spaces again go unmentioned.

It’s hard to believe that Bailey played Rowling, one of the most famous feminists alive, and didn’t do any research into the long history of the fight for single-sex spaces or the urinary leash. We’re given no context as to why the discussion about toilets is so charged, or even what the opposing views are. She tells us that “[Rowling’s] tweets are horrific; she’s recycling the same arguments that were used against blacks and gays in the ‘60s and ‘70s”, but again fails to quote Rowling directly, or give us a single example. The show’s poster, featuring a bewigged Bailey, as Rowling, with tape over her mouth, is starting to take on a depressing, literal significance.

Rowling’s history as a survivor of domestic violence is given as the sole reason why she holds the views she does, though we’re never clearly told what those views are. Bailey fairly gives props to her for leaving an abusive relationship with a 4-month-old baby to start her life again while fighting depression. But alas, Rowling apparently failed to heal from her experiences correctly. Bailey condescendingly tells us that “leaning into fear can build an identity like Jo [Rowling] did.” Making no mention of the global franchise she created, her successful novels since, her close-knit loving family, or her extensive charitable work, Rowling’s identity is reduced to that of a bitter survivor of domestic violence.

Bailey reveals that she had a miscarriage before being cast as Rowling, and admits that she never would have been cast had she been pregnant but makes no connection between this fundamentally female experience and the views of the character she’s cast as, only saying she didn’t want to have three children anyway. She doesn’t go into how pregnant women are discriminated against in the workplace at all, another feminist issue, presuming we either already know, or don’t care to. Again, what Rowling has written on reproductive rights or pregnancy discrimination is left entirely unexamined.

In a wildly misogynistic moment, she suggests to us that it’s notable that Rowling’s outspokenness on the trans topic began during menopause and she imagines Rowling with her head in the freezer, trying to counteract a hot flush, as she’s simultaneously tweeting. The audience, myself excluded, laughs. This image feels like the hardest Bailey has tried to imagine Rowling’s perspective on anything during this entire process. We are now fully an hour into a show about JK Rowling in which JK Rowling has said nothing.

She describes the process of writing this show as finally committing to paper the “words I’m not allowed to say out loud”. Which words does she mean? She’s not said anything particularly controversial or that deviates from the arts-world-approved playbook on trans issues. Presumably, if she had, the KHT would have refused to stage this production at all, citing their strict code of conduct.

I kept waiting for Bailey to go into any depth at all about what Rowling has actually said to cause so much ire. Instead, in the shallowest, and most egregiously offensive moment of all, Bailey declares that “trans people just want to be believed - like domestic violence victims.” That is not, in fact, all 'trans people' want. Their list of demands is long and varied: changes to language, access to all spaces at all times, medical interventions on minors, the stifling of dissent, and legal consequences for those who fail to comply. None of this is mentioned in the play, not even to be defended. The outrageous comparison of trans people to domestic violence victims survived all 889 drafts, and Bailey has apparently never thought to interrogate it once.

Bailey also has an exalted view of her own talents as an actor. A bad script being badly acted. I didn’t even realise she was performing multiple characters for the first 10 minutes.

On exiting the theatre, I make my way to the toilets, inevitably finding that they are mixed sex, and reluctantly enter through the door which “contains cubicles”. A minute or two later, a man enters the cubicle next to me, whistling loudly, and unleashes one of those powerful horse-pisses only men are capable of. It seems to last eight minutes. When he exits his cubicle and finds me at the sinks, he abruptly stops his whistling, turns red, and leaves without washing his hands.

“Rowling In It” plays at the King’s Head Theatre, Islington, until April 18

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This article will look at how the Australian Safe Schools initiative helped drive the explosion in youth referrals to gender clinics in Victoria over the past 15 years.

The Safe Schools Coalition (SSC) was a Victorian (and later federal) government-funded initiative to reduce bullying of LGBTQi school students. Schools who joined the coalition received the following:

1. Training teachers to deliver All of Us workshops for students.

2. Advice on social transition at school

3. How to embed LGBTQi content in maths and other subjects.

4. Policy reviews and school culture change.

5. Starting LGBTQi school groups.

6. Resources including: OMG I’m Queer, OMG My Friend’s Queer, Stand Out

Safe Schools recruits staff and students to become activists:

Safe Schools Origins

La Trobe University conducted a series of surveys; Writing Themselves In: A National Report on the Sexuality, Health and Well-being of Same-Sex Attracted Young People.

While the 1998 and 2004 survey focused on LGB youth the 2010 survey included questions about ‘gender identity’ and claimed that 75% of LGBTQi students were bullied at school.

But the survey was neither a rigorous nor representative scientific study and included the following methodological flaws:

1. No probability or random sampling from schools or the broader youth population.

2. It relied on broad definitions and self-report of “abuse” including hearing comments e.g. “that’s so gay”, graffiti, online content, comments from friends and “rumours.”

3. There were no measures for “severity” or “frequency” of “abuse”.

4. It asked the question: “Has anyone ever been abusive to you because of your sexuality?”

5. Recruitment via social media and gay community groups ( including adults up to 21 years of age).

Queer theory and Marxist Roots of Safe Schools

Roz Ward is a Marxist activist, “proud communist” and one of the principal architects of the Safe Schools initiative.

Ward directed the design of the All of Us training materials with input from Minus 18 - a trans activist organisation founded by convicted paedophile, Colin Billings. The All of Us materials were designed to normalise and operationalise gender identity ideology into the heart of the curriculum and influence educators and young people to accept it as ‘fact’ and not as a contested belief.

While Ward promoted the initiative as an anti-bullying program her ideological motivations were made clear at the 2015 Marxist conference when she said:

“Marxism offers both the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinary, new and amazing ways.”

“It will be through a revitalised class struggle and revolutionary change that we can hope for the liberation of LGBTQi people.”

“To smooth the operation of capitalism the ruling class has benefited … from oppressing our bodies, our relationships, sexuality and gender identities alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Both serve to break the spirits of ordinary people, to consume our thoughts, to make us accept the status quo and for us to keep living or aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and families where we must reproduce and take responsibility for those people in those units.”

Roz Ward – a “proud gay communist” and co-founder of Safe Schools Coalition

Victorian Rollout of Safe Schools

1. 2010–11 pilot schools recruited.

2. 2013 National expansion with $8 million of federal funding.

3. 2014 All of Us materials developed and teacher training.

4. 2015/2016 Peak training of 11,500 Victorian teachers.

5. 2016 545 Victorian schools are now members of SSC.

6. 2016-2017 National controversies lead to the Louden inquiry (see below).

7. 2018-2026 Victoria continues Safe Schools training as educational policy

The All of Us materials present trans identification as a naturally occurring phenomena - but the exact opposite is true.

The increase in trans identification in almost exclusively young adolescent children is driven by the imposition of gender identity ideology into education.

Unpacking the Ideology in All of Us

10 percent of people are same-sex attracted

The statistic is often repeated by queer activists and originated from Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, but Kinsey surveyed male prisoners, male sex workers and men in gay bars – hardly representative of the wider population.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2024) puts the figure for sexual orientation as 1.5% gay or lesbian and 1.7% bisexual or ‘other’ including asexual, pansexual, queer or gender diverse. The fact that the ABS includes asexual, pansexual, queer or gender diverse is itself testament to the success of gender ideology to promote sexuality and even ‘sex’ as socially constructed spectra rather than binary and biologically determined.

1.7% of people are intersex

The 1.7% figure comes from the work of Anne-Fausto-Sterling who included those with everyday hormonal and chromosomal variations e.g. women with polycystic ovaries and other common, non-ambiguous variations. None of these variations are classified as intersex by reputable medical bodies or those who suffer them.

When these normal variations are excluded from the statistic those with intersex conditions is 0.018% – 0.05% of the population. (See Leonard Sax)

Intersex is used to confuse students (and teachers) about human biology who are encouraged to believe sex is not binary but on a “spectrum” and humans may fall “in-between” male and female.

Including the inflated 1.7% figure also implies nine students out of 500 are intersex when the true figure would be one in every 5,556.

Students should be taught the biological science that there are only two human developmental pathways - males (with small gametes) and females (with large gametes). While normal human variation include hormonal, chromosomal and sex characteristic variations (Disorders of Sexual Development or Intersex) these occur within these two developmental binary types.

But misinformation regarding intersex is an essential stepping stone to gaining acceptance of the more radical pseudoscientific concept of ‘gender identity.’ And once “gender identity” is accepted as “fact” the ideology moves on to the creation of the “trans child”.

4% of people are transgender or gender diverse

All of Us introduces “gender identity” as an inner, subjective sense of self that “overrides” biological sex to become the child’s “true” self. The “trans child” is merely “assigned” sex at birth and embarks on a journey of “affirmation” to become “who they really are”. Teachers and students are encouraged to celebrate and promote gender ideology throughout the school year and raise money for LGBTQi+ charities by supporting:

1. Pride and Mardi Gras

2. LGBTQi+ History Month

3. International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia

4. International Non-Binary People’s Day

5. Wear it Purple Day

6. Trans Awareness Month

7. Asexual Awareness Week …. the list goes on

State Imposed Ideology

The Victorian Department of Education’s policy is to assign students as “mature minors” where parents oppose a child’s transition and permit schools to engage in secret transition that includes changing names, pronouns, school uniform and allowing inclusion in opposite sex toilets, sports and spaces.

While the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC) can investigate even anonymous complaints about parents or professionals who work with children who refuse to “affirm” a child’s gender identity. The VEOHRC can impose large fines or press criminal charges against parents that can lead to 10 years’ imprisonment.

Evidence-based reviews from Europe and the U.K. show that social transition as a means to “lock-in” a young person’s trans identification that leads to a medical pathway - known as the “schools-to-clinic pipeline”. (see Cass Review)

Iatrogenic Harm

The All of Us claim that a significant number of children are transgender puts the cart before the horse. (It’s important to remember this material was written in 2010 before which there was only a single referral to the main gender clinic every two years.)

Safe Schools training plays a significant role in driving iatrogenic harm by imposing gender identity ideology onto a young school population. Teaching students that biological sex is now optional and that “feelings” define their true identity has led many LGB, autistic and otherwise vulnerable youth to believe medical transition might resolve their comorbidities.

Victorian gender clinic referrals skyrocketed following the rollout of Safe Schools.

Safe Schools Controversy

In 2016 Roz Ward posted the following comment on a Facebook account leaked to the press:

“Now we just need to get rid of the racist Australian flag on top of state parliament and get a red one up there and my work is done.”

Ward’s other public statements linking Safe Schools to queer theory and Marxism led to a federal review in 2016 called the Louden inquirythat took only two weeks, was limited in scope and failed to ask the basic questions:

1. Is the information provided in the training evidence-based, scientific and accurate?

2. Might teaching gender identity ideology itself lead to an increase in referrals to gender clinics?

The head of the RCH gender clinic at the time Dr. Michelle Telfer rowed into the debate about Safe Schools and said:

“If a girl says she’s a boy, or a boy says he’s a girl, and they are not supported, they are at extremely high risk of suicide.”

Telfer advocated for an immediate affirmation-only approach including social transition at schools and stated that:

“We would be lost without Safe Schools. What we see on an everyday basis is young trans children and adolescents being stigmatised, verbally and physically abused by peers… We engage Safe Schools to help them be less stigmatised and to keep them safe. Regardless of what people think about the politics, the reality for us as clinicians is that Safe Schools is really helpful.”

Several Australian states amended or replaced Safe Schools following the debacle with their own anti-bullying training while the Victorian Labor government continues to promote Safe Schools training as integral to its education policy.

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The sound is a bit all over the place. We’ve not yet settled on a format but I’m hoping to do this on a more regular basis with Libby. I really love talking to her. Video is below.

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Martina Navratilova with members of the Lesbian Action Group

In a local Melbourne eatery, women from the Lesbian Action Group (LAG) broke bread with one of the greatest female athletes the world has ever seen. Martina Navratilova dominated women’s tennis for decades, winning 18 Grand Slam singles titles and 31 major doubles titles. While in town for the Australian Open, Navratilova offered her support for LAG’s February appeal case for the right to hold single-sex public events for lesbians.

Nicole Mowbray from the Lesbian Action Group outside the Federal Court in Melbourne

Background

In 2023 LAG wrote to the Victorian Pride centre for permission to hold an event to celebrate International Lesbian Day on October 8th for “lesbians born female.” Pride Centre, CEO Justine Dalla Riva refused. LAG then embarked on a series of legal challenges to rebuild the once-thriving lesbian community forced underground since the early 2000s when women lost the right to refuse entry to men.

Round one:

In 2023 LAG applied to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for a temporary exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA)1984 to hold public events for “lesbians born female.” The AHRC refused.

Round two:

LAG appealed the AHRC’s decision to the Federal Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) in January 2025. The ART upheld the AHRC refusal.

Round Three:

LAG appealed to the Federal Court on 23–24 February with a ruling expected in six months.

How did we get here?

The SDA was enacted in 1984 to implement key parts of the international bill of rights, CEDAW – (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) and both sought to protect women on the basis of the biological reality of sex. But under the Gillard Labor government, the SDA was amended in 2013 to include “gender identity” as a protected characteristic opening the door for men who self- identify as ‘women’ access to single-sex spaces and services.

Justice Bromwich Ruling

In August 2024, Federal Court Justice, Robert Bromwich ruled in Tickle v Giggle for Girls that “sex” in the SDA was “changeable”, not “necessarily binary” and not “fixed at birth”.

The Bromwich ruling compels Australians to accept a metaphysical claim that a person’s subjective ‘identity’ overrides biological reality for all legal and social purposes.

The Bromwich ruling erases homosexuality because sex is no longer a biological category but a matter of a subjective, self-declared ‘gender identity’.

The ruling is built on a central contradiction - to prove discrimination it’s necessary to have a comparator of a “different sex.” But if “sex” already incorporates men with a “gender identity” then men are already “women”. Bromwich forecloses legal challenges to identity-based inclusion and for the cases making their way through the courts he tips the scale to collapse “sex” altogether.

Sexual coercion of young lesbians

In 2012 the trans activist and porn performer, Drew DeVeaux coined the term “cotton ceiling” to frame the issue regarding lesbians who supported ‘trans rights’ but refused to have sex with ‘trans women’ - in 87-95% of cases men who identify as women remain fully intact.

The cotton ceiling was both the metaphorical and literal ‘barrier’ lesbians needed to overcome to demonstrate their support for the ‘full acceptance’ of ‘trans rights’.

The grassroots U.K. organisation Get the L Out conducted a survey in 2019 with 80 women (78 lesbians and 2 bisexual women) about their experiences in the LGBTQi community. Here are some of the results:

66 per cent reported being intimidated or receiving threats for stating they were lesbians (not attracted to trans identified males). Threats included physical or sexual violence, being doxed, threats to kill family members and being sent unwanted “trans woman nudes”.

56 per cent were pressured or coerced to accept a transwoman as a sexual partner.

50 per cent reported being excluded from their LGBT group/s for questioning any aspect of queer doctrine and labelled as ‘transphobic.’

Respondents reported experiencing sex by deception, being raped, sexually assaulted, and socially shamed and excluded for not ‘going along’ with the doctrine.

“I was told that homosexuality doesn’t exist and I owed it to my trans sisters’ to unlearn my ‘genital confusion’ so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me”.

“I thought I would be called a transphobe or that it would be wrong of me to turn down a transwoman who wanted to exchange nude pictures – young women feel pressurised to sleep with transwomen to “prove I am not a TERF”.

“The man I went on a date with, unknowingly, was mutual friends with people I knew, he threatened to out me as a TERF and risk my job if I refused to sleep with him. I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory, so he was a “woman” even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and he raped me”.

It’s not surprising that young lesbians between 18 – 24 years old are most vulnerable and susceptible to both group and ideological pressure.

Young lesbians in Australia who attended LAG’s first conference (held in secret) told the same story; they are under enormous pressure to accept and publicly support gender identity dogma: “trans women are women”, “penises are just another body part”, “some lesbians have penises.”

“The language of transition lends itself readily to abusive gaslighting that disguises and distorts women’s ability to name what is happening”. (survey respondent)

LAG’s legal arguments

LAG appealed to the Federal Court to reinstate their right to freedom of association and protection from male coercion and sexual predation. LAG’s barristers, Megan Blake and Leigh Howard argued that:

1. The legal meaning of “sex” in the SDA, “should be interpreted as a biological class separate to gender identity.”

2. Maintaining “sex” as a biological category alongside “gender identity” preserves the integrity of both without collapsing one into the other.”

3. Justice Robert Bromwich’s earlier ruling in the Tickle v Giggle for Girls case (2024) was wrong in finding that “sex” can be “changeable and non-binary.”

4. The ART ruling created an unlawful “hierarchy of rights” and that lesbian rights to freedom of association and expression were subordinated to “unidentified rights of the transgender community.”

5. The ART ruling creates an “oppressive interference” and a “chilling effect” on an already marginalised group amounting to “state-endorsed discrimination.”

6. Lesbians have a right to seek their own spaces free from “the male gaze”.

The AHRC’s response

Justice Mark Moshinsky cut through the legalese to point out the obvious hole in the HRC case by asking barrister, Celia Winnett a simple question:

“On what legal basis does the Commission distinguish between the exclusion of natal men and transgender women, notwithstanding their shared biological sex?”

Winnett replied that there was “no error of law” and that:

“Trans lesbians see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as women and lesbians. The exclusion here seeks to perpetuate the view that actually they are neither of those things.”

Listening to Winnett’s argument brought to mind the scene in the movie Michael Clayton in which Tilda Swinton plays Karen Crowder, a senior counsel paid to defend an agrochemical conglomerate U-North, from a billion-dollar class action lawsuit. In an oscar-winning scene, we watch Swinton practise her speech in front of a mirror - choosing and then discarding a particular word, rehearsing her timing, phrasing, delivery and adjusting her body language in order to create a façade convincing enough to get away with a billion-dollar lie.

Like Karen Crowder, Winnett had anticipated the question and prepared her answer – each word chosen with care. The two sentences a perfect pair of self-reinforcing ideological axioms.

Winnett’s rhetoric is designed to impose the state-approved narrative that, in the so-called modern era is simply extraordinary. It demands that we discard everything humanity has long accepted as true on the basis of biology, empirical science, observable evidence, evolutionary history, and cross-cultural human experience.

Winnett’s “trans lesbian”is not a minor linguistic tweak, it requires we accept a reality in direct opposition to those foundations and is built on the following interlocking propositions:

1. We each possess an innate, unfalsifiable “gender identity” that exists independently of our physical body and cannot be tested or disproven.

2. This subjective identity is the “true self”; the material body a mere container.

3. Children can be “born in the wrong body,” and their sense of self at odds with their sexed biology.

4. Biological sex is not an immutable, binary characteristic but merely a social construct.

5. A “woman” is anyone with a “female gender identity,” irrespective of biological reality.

6. A man can be declared “female” through identity or medical intervention.

7. Sexual orientation is keyed to gender identity, not to sexed bodies.

8. Same-sex attraction is therefore erased and replaced with “same-gender” attraction.

9. Consequently, a biological male who identifies as a woman and is sexually attracted to women qualifies as a legitimate “trans lesbian.”

“Trans lesbians see themselves” Winnett reinforces queer theory - trans identities are “constructed”. A man lookS in the mirror to see what he desires to be - a “real woman”.

Winnett’s use of “manifest” implies a performative act a la Judith Butler that ‘gender’ is simply the result of oft repeated behaviours, as opposed to the gay rights “born this way” that recognised homosexuality as a stable, biologically-determined sexual orientation.

Winnett frames LAG’s appeal as ideologically driven and exclusionary – “the exclusion here seeks to perpetuate a view.”

But this is an ideological bait and switch a cynical reversal. It’s gender ideology that is the “view” being imposed. The demands of men whether medicalised or fully intact to enter all women’s spaces is the real erasure. The erasure of women’s historical rights for single-sex spaces and services.

Winnett uses “actually“ to imply there is an objective truth. But this is the truth according to the Commission and Justice Bromwich and not the truth according to biology, truth and common sense.

Tilda Swinton’s fictional character exposes the extreme cognitive dissonance required to tell billion dollar lies.

Women like Winnett and men like Justice Bromwich must become hypocritical, cynical, cruel and indifferent to the fate of vulnerable girls and women in prisons, hospitals, changing rooms, universities and sports. And in order to get away with it, you must monster the women as “bigots”, “transphobes” and “sexual racists”.

Women in sport

Martina Navratilova co-founded the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (WSPWG) in 2021 with athletes, lawyers, coaches and medical experts. The group spent two years exploring the issues of trans inclusion in women’s sport and concluded biological males retain significant, unfair advantages over women.

In 2021 Navratilova wrote an article in the Sunday Times and said:

“…hundreds of athletes who have changed gender by declaration and limited hormone treatment” have achieved “honors as women that were beyond their capabilities as men.”

Navratilova went from gay icon and celebrated trans ally to global hate figure overnight. The Guardian and CNN described her comments as, “disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic”, while Athlete Ally, a U.S. not-for-profit that advocates for trans inclusion in sport removed Navratilova as ambassador and said her comments were:

“… transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence.

First of all, trans women are women, period. They did not decide their gender identity any more than someone decides to be gay, or to have blue eyes.”“

In a 2025 article, “Martina Stands with Monsters,” the sportswriter Dave Zirin wrote:

“In many ways, tennis trailblazer Martina Navratilova is worse than a Trump supporter…. I’m sickened by what Martina has become. To see her align herself with the right on transgender rights has been so repugnant and shows how her claims of being liberal about everything but this issue is pathetically hollow and deeply cynical.”

Before the young Martina defected to the U.S. in1975 from communist Czechoslovakia, her stepfather warned her not to come back; “no matter what I tell you on the phone because we may have a gun to our heads”.

Navratilova became persona non grata in Czechoslovakia following her defection, stripped of her citizenship, erased from records and branded a traitor who chose money over her country. Yet after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 Navratilova was rehabilitated and became a symbol of courage and awarded the Order of the White Lion in 2025 as a national hero.

Likewise Martina Navratilova was a gay icon and early trailblazer in the U.S. for gay rights. That was right up until the moment Navratilova refused to lie about biology and sporting advantage. Navratilova was soon erased from Pride narratives, called out in interviews and monstered in the public square.

Both Navratilova and LAG are fighting to assert simple truths:

Humans are a dimorphic species.

Sex is biological.

Homosexuality is same-sex attraction.

Men who identify as ‘trans lesbians and insist on ignoring women’s boundaries are heterosexual, predatory men.

In a recent post on X, LAG wrote:

“Some of us fight for lesbian-only spaces free from men who say they are lesbians. Some of us fight for women’s sport free from men who say they are women. Same fight. It was an absolute thrill to meet Martina.”

The LAG ruling is due around August 2026.

Rest assured, no one is more surprised than me. But I just started messing around on Redplit and now I’ve made an app. This is from the About page.

Shoebox: A Serendipity Engine

My handwriting looks like I’ve just been tortured so I never really fell into the habit of keeping a notebook, and I’ve always envied people who do.

It’s a very good habit to have. We all have ideas we never write down. Half-formed thoughts that nonetheless make you laugh. Images from dreams that won’t go away. Snappy comebacks that came to you just too late. Shoebox is built on the belief that those ideas are worth saving and that something interesting happens when you save enough of them.

The concept is simple. You fill the box with 100 ideas. Any kind of idea. A character. A what-if. A place you passed through once. A premise you thought you’d never use. A phrase that’s been rattling around your head for weeks. The box stays locked until you hit 100. That’s it.

Once you unlock the box, the games begin. Shoebox lets you shuffle, collide, and recombine your ideas in ways you didn’t expect. Connections surface between things you’d forgotten, something stale turns strange again, two unrelated notions suddenly click. That’s the serendipity.

The inspiration comes from Woody Allen, who kept boxes and suitcases and drawers full of scraps. A character note here, a premise there. He would often find a connection between disparate ideas that he could turn into a story, a script and then a film. And from David Lynch, who learned from his teacher Frank Daniel that to make a feature film, you gather ideas, put each one on a 3×5 card, and as soon as you have 70, you have a film.

Another inspiration was James Webb Young’s classic A Technique for Producing Ideas, which argues that creativity isn’t inspiration. It’s collection, combination, and the patient willingness to let things brew.

Restriction is the point. You can’t play until you’ve done the work.

Now do the work.

You can start using Shoebox here.

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One of the worst interviews I ever took part in was at the Belfast Film Festival. A man who could not have cared less about me or Father Ted asked questions handed to him by audience members because he clearly didn’t think anything of the show himself. I thought at the time it was just bad programming — one of those things you chalk up to experience and forget. But no. It’s just who they are. A bunch of elitists who sneer at the people for whom they are given the honour of curating events.

On 8 March, Belfast Film Festival will screen The Matrix at the SARC Sonic Lab in Dolby Atmos. The screening will be accompanied by a presentation from Olivia Ó’Ríada, who will be “diving into the oft-misread queer context of The Wachowskis’ breakout film, attempting to reclaim ‘the red pill’ from 25+ years of misunderstanding.” The event is part of BFF’s Sparks 25 project, funded by the BFI through the National Lottery — your money, in other words — and focused on reaching what the programme calls “underserved areas of the audience.”

A bit of film analysis, a bit of outreach. Perfectly pleasant — in the way that a middle finger is just a finger. Here’s what’s really going on. March 8 is International Women’s Day, and the BFF just spent a fortnight in an employment tribunal explaining why it destroyed a woman’s career.

Sara Morrison was Belfast Film Festival’s Inclusion and Audience Development Coordinator. She’s a single mother whose adult son identifies as trans. In April 2023 she attended a Let Women Speak rally in Belfast and spoke about the fact that people can’t change their biological sex, a subject obviously close to her heart, given the harm the ideology has already visited upon her family.

What happened next is the same thing that happened to me, to Allison Phillips, to Maya Forstater, to Jo Phoenix, to Kathleen Stock, to Rosie Kay, to Jenny Lindsay, to Rosie Duffield, and to countless other men and women across the woke west. Trans activists came to destroy her life, and the people who should have defended her instead fed her to the mob.

Sara made her speech, and the footage circulated. The organisations Morrison had criticised in her speech — women’s sector groups who long ago decided to betray women in favour of crossdressing men — leaned on BFF. And the BFF folded like Imane Khelif in a fair fight.

Well, maybe not that fast. In the early days they were helpful enough to print out the online abuse she was receiving so she could report it to the police. Then, board chair Mark Cousins stepped in. He emailed colleagues to say Morrison had shown “no hint of regret” (for what, exactly, Mark?) and suggested she be “removed from queer and trans projects.” His co-chair Laurence McKeown — an ex-IRA hunger striker, because Belfast — helpfully compared Morrison’s attendance at a women’s rights rally to “sharing a platform with dissident republicans advocating armed struggle.” He walked that one back fairly sharpish under cross-examination.

BFF brought in an external PR firm. They brought in an external HR firm. They revoked Morrison’s access to work systems, took her keys, reset her email password but sent it to her work address rather than her personal one, which is like changing someone's locks and then posting the new key through the letterbox of the house they can no longer get into. Stupidity or cruelty? With gender ideology, it’s often both. It’s a belief system that tends to bring out the Dickens villain in people who presumably believe themselves beyond reproach.

Michele Devlin, the festival director, put out a public statement reassuring the activist groups that BFF “passionately supports your values.” She then attended Belfast Pride in a t-shirt bearing the words “TRANS INCLUSIVE FEMINIST” in block capitals, just in case the mob might mistake her for her awful feminist colleague.

Morrison went on sick leave. Her grievance was rejected. Her grievance appeal was rejected. She resigned in November 2024 and filed a tribunal claim for discrimination based on gender-critical beliefs and constructive dismissal.

The hearing took place in November 2025 at Killymeal House in Belfast. It did not go well for BFF. Cousins was forced to explain under cross-examination why he’d said Morrison should be removed from “queer and trans projects” but not the women’s sector work — thereby undermining BFF’s entire stated rationale for the investigation. When asked whether he believed people could change sex, he offered examples from botany.

The tribunal was further enlivened when Morrison’s legal team filed a recusal application against the entire three-person panel. One member, Professor Deborah Boyd, had run an organisation on the other side of the argument and hadn’t thought to mention it. Observers in the gallery reported her making hostile facial expressions during cross-examinations. She eventually stepped down citing “health reasons.”

The verdict is pending.

Like most of those with luxury beliefs, Cousins is a man who cannot defend his position when it’s tested in open court. And when you can’t defend your position, you have two options: you can admit you were wrong, or you and the other mean girls of the BFF can start doing what you’re best at, namely, passive aggressive trolling.

Which brings us back to International Women’s Day.

That Matrix event on 8 March isn’t just a film screening. The presenter, Olivia Ó’Ríada, is a co-director of the Trans Image/Trans Experience Film Festival in Dublin. That festival’s producer is Head of Film Programming at Outburst Arts — the Belfast queer arts organisation that was part of the network that pressured BFF over Morrison. BFF’s own director, Michele Devlin, previously ran the GAZE International LGBT Film Festival, where another of Ó’Ríada’s co-founders now works.

Innit a small world!? The same people, circling the same venues, drawing from the same pots of public money. And now one of them is giving a talk at BFF on International Women’s Day, a film whose trans reading was retrofitted years after its release, after both directors, veterans of LA’s BDSM scene, began crossdressing.

This is what trans activism is really all about. Nothing to do with a marginalised community seeking acceptance but a coordinating, connected power structure asserting dominance over the lower orders. BFF isn’t celebrating women on International Women’s Day. It’s celebrating the ideology that was used to destroy one particular woman’s career, rubbing every other woman’s nose in it, while being rewarded with public money.

When your ideology requires the suppression of women’s speech as a condition of its existence, then every platform you take on a day set aside for women is an act of supreme misogynistic trolling. I doubt there is an email on which they were foolish enough to write “let’s programme this specifically to humiliate Sara and any other uppity woman” but there doesn’t need to be. BFF staff are embarrassed and angry that Sara humiliated them in court and revealed their misogyny to the world. This is a nice little bit of revenge that they can pass off as inclusion. (And if you still need convincing, this unit is the other act they’re serving up on March 8.)

Sara didn't deserve this. And neither do the women of Belfast who support single-sex spaces and women-only sports — positions so ordinary they shouldn't need defending at all. But at least it serves as a reminder that trans is not a liberation movement. It is a form of trolling, an assertion of power over the people it wishes to dominate,

Mark Cousins and the BFF are a pack of misogynist trolls. They took the one day of the year that’s supposed to be about women, and they made it about men. All for spite and petty revenge.

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As I write in February 2026, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (TL) and I have come to a legal agreement, and my case against them for employment discrimination and constructive dismissal has been dropped. It has been a very challenging two years — my life dramatically changed direction when I dared to question, or even expect a discussion about, TL’s BLM/Diversity action plan.

In February 2024, the principal Anthony Bowne (AB) sent an email to all staff and students promoting this plan and asking for feedback on his statement that there was “systemic inequality” in the institution and the music world. I felt I had some standing to comment. I’ve spent 35 years teaching in conservatoires including the Royal Academy of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Middlesex University, Birmingham Conservatoire and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, as well as TL itself. I’ve performed in 30 countries and recorded more than 30 albums under my own name, along with featuring on many other artists’ recordings. I’ve been in the jazz scene for over 40 years.

I wrote an email response to the principal. I never heard back from him or anyone else.

My own experience is that there is no institutional discrimination against black musicians in jazz. In fact, the opposite is often the case, thanks to DEI — what used to be called positive discrimination. The Critical Race Theory that TL seemed to be promoting — that all white people are privileged and all black people are discriminated against — is divisive and untrue. This isn’t about whether racism exists. Of course it does, and not only against black people. But I do not see it “institutionalised” in the way the principal was suggesting, not on the TL jazz course I was involved with for 22 years, and not in the wider jazz scene.

I listed many black artists who have succeeded in the system — good luck to them, I don’t begrudge it, and several are my friends — but to suggest they are marginalised is simply not true. The principal was keen to announce that TL had achieved 50% “global majority” on its board of governors, but said this was not enough. A bizarre statement in a majority white country, and hardly representative of the UK population. If a principal in Nigeria suggested they should have 50% whites on a board, it would be laughed at.

I sent my response to the principal and copied in the head of jazz Hans Koller (HK) and the director of music Aleks Szram (AS). I also shared it with a third-year student with whom I regularly chatted about all kinds of things — music, philosophy, world events, health. Students had been asked for their feedback too, and I was hoping for an open discussion across the jazz course. I now realise I was naïve to think TL wanted any such thing.

This student read my email aloud to a handful of other students. One of them complained to the head of jazz. I don’t know exactly what was said, but I received an email stating that my classes were temporarily halted because a student was “anxious” about my email’s contents.

Rumours spread through the student body, and I was told they were all demanding to see it. TL then organised what I would describe as a secret meeting with all 95 jazz course students — without me or any other jazz staff present, and with no minutes taken — to discuss an email that only a handful of them had actually read. This was clearly an opportunity to exacerbate the situation rather than be the adults in the room. I only knew it was happening because a postgraduate student texted me from the meeting: “They are having a meeting about your email.”

The next day I was called in to meet HK and AS. Hans had been a friend of mine for 30 years. We had toured together, I was close with his family, we had recorded albums. But the ideology he had taken on was apparently above friendship, and his salary needed protecting. He insisted my email be sent out to students, as they were clamouring to see it. He said he would resign if it wasn’t released, and added: “I fear for your safety.” Not much protection of staff, then. Students — customers — rule.

There was strong emotional pressure in this meeting for me to release the email, and I had not slept much, so I was in a vulnerable state. I am also a very open person and don’t mind being wrong. I was still hoping for a genuine internal discussion — firstly with staff, then with student involvement. That was never going to happen. I agreed to the email being sent to all jazz students, with the background emails included: AB’s free speech statement and the BLM/Diversity email I was responding to.

This is an excerpt from AB’s 2022 email on free speech to all staff and students: “Trinity Laban provides a wide range of mediums where free and frank intellectual exchanges take place and the diverse views of individuals are tolerated, whilst also assuring the safety of students, staff and members of the public. It is of paramount importance that both respect and dignity are always afforded to colleagues and students alike and particularly where there may be differences in opinion, belief and views.”

TL’s actual approach reminded me of the Idi Amin line: “There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

Once the email went out, it was immediately posted on social media. A postgraduate student, Folakemi, created a change.org petition calling me racist and demanding my removal. A student I had supported and taught, and for whom I had, in my own time, found a guitarist for a gig she then went on to collaborate with. Interestingly, ex-students from ten years ago set up a counter-petition in my favour.

The social media storm began. Lies and attacks piled up online. Supporters who tried to push back were shut down. I went on sick leave for five months. The Free Speech Union (FSU) came to my defence and took on my case, hiring Doyle Clayton solicitors. Rosie Kay, the wonderful dancer and choreographer, also came to my rescue. She and Denise Fahmy — both of whom had been cancelled themselves — had set up Freedom in the Arts (FITA). The support from these three sources was invaluable and I can’t thank them enough.

TL then said they wanted me to come back and teach as normal in autumn 2024. All my classes and one-to-one lessons would be scheduled as usual.

So I went in to fulfil my contract — a 0.5 fractional post — and was met with a 100% boycott of my classes by the students. It was like running a gauntlet. Walking into the courtyard, I was ignored by students in their group huddles, eyes diverting away from me. Normally we would stop and chat. The hive mind was very clear to see. They had bonded in their tribe against me without thinking. It was a sad experience, watching the fear in them — the knowledge that if anybody stepped out of line, they would be cancelled themselves.

This went on for five weeks. Three days a week, I went in, was ignored, walked to my teaching rooms, and practised saxophone and composed music. No teaching. AS then said at half-term that this couldn’t continue as “the students are missing out on their education, so we need to give your classes to other teachers.” But because I was on contract, he had to offer me work. His suggestion: that I research a new Masters course in Jazz and Education online. I’m not sure how that would have filled a 0.5 post over the year — it would have taken me a few hours. It seemed a joke, and they knew I would refuse. It was not what I was employed for, not what was in my contract, and not what I had been doing for 23 years: teaching music in a practical, hands-on way.

So I resigned and took out the two legal cases mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

Meanwhile, the two other conservatoires I taught at — RAM and GSMD — fell into lockstep. Their students were too “anxious” to study with me as well, and the heads of department bowed to their customers’ wishes. Gigs were cancelled. A record label refused to release my latest recording. London Jazz Orchestra told me to step down from the band. Musicians would not perform publicly with me or even rehearse with me. Other bands would not play my music. A recording studio, Lightship 95, would not even take my money, as TL was a client of theirs. One musician told me: “I’m not playing with you now, but I’m not ruling it out in the future.” All of these people have to keep their fragile status in the jazz scene, and they feel that attacking me — or at least not being associated with me — is how they do it. No critical thinking involved. Everything I loved, all the teaching and gigs, has been taken away by mob rule.

But gigs are slowly coming back, even if conservatoire teaching is gone for good. These places are now captured ideologically, with the religion of “diversity” and the imperative to please the students above all else, including music. As Martin Luther King said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

There are good things happening. I have had wonderful support from many new friends. I am rehearsing lots of new music with like-minded people, and Rosie Kay and I are collaborating on a very exciting project — The Dinner Party: Uncancelled — for which I have composed the music. Onwards and upwards. None of these two years needed to happen. But maybe they were meant to.

Martin Speake

(My email response to the ‘systemic inequality’ suggested by TL can be found easily online. Students decided to post it on social media. Here it is)

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Below are the latest stories from Australian women fighting for free speech, women’s rights and child safeguarding in schools.

Celine Against the eSafety Machine

Celine Baumgarten wins her case against e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant

In 2024 Celine Baumgarten, a young single mum from Western Sydney criticised a Victorian primary school for holding a “Queer Club” for children aged 8–12 who identified as LGBTQi+. Baumgarten’s X post questioned the appropriateness of teaching “queer theory” at school and in particular to primary school children.

While Baumgarten’s post did not meet the legal definition of cyber abuse, the eSafety commissioner issued an “informal notice” to X resulting in the post being geoblocked in Australia. With the help of the Free Speech Union, Baumgarten appealed to the Victorian Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) where she won her case after the ART ruled “informal notices” were unlawful.

The eSafety commission then appealed the ART decision to the Federal Court of Australia arguing that the ART lacked jurisdiction to review the matter.

The appeal was heard by the Full Bench of the Federal Court that ruled the informal “complaint alert” amounted to a removal notice (because it amounted to X blocking the post) and was therefore reviewable by the ART.

The Federal Court ruling prevents the eSafety commissioner from bypassing statutory safeguards including transparency, appeal rights, and due process by labelling the action “informal.”

This is an embarrassing loss for a commissioner who has tried on several other occasions to shut down those who challenge gender identity ideology by censoring speech and framing dissent as “discrimination” “harm” and “hate.”

Following her win at the Federal Court, Celine Baumgarten posted on X:

Bestiality and incest in LGBTQi+ school training

South Australian mum, Nicki Gaylard and her daughter Courtney Gaylard.

Another mother challenging the imposition of “queer theory” in schools is South Australian mother of six, Nicki Gaylard.

In March 2024, Nicki’s 14-year-old daughter, Courtney and other Year 9 girls from Renmark High School were pulled out of class to attend an hour-long session by external facilitators who promote LGBTQI+ “inclusivity, diversity and acceptance.” Headspace, the federally funded NGO that received up to $120 million dollars in 2024 -2025 engaged a third-party presenter to deliver a training session to the students because of their “lived experience” of being “trans”.

The training session included a PowerPoint presentation that made references to bestiality and incest including “brother love,” “sister love,” and “sibling sex” as well as images of “trans bodies” that showed surgical scars from double mastectomies.

14-year-old, Emelia Wundenberg told ABC news that the presenter referenced their own sexual preferences and spoke in sexually explicit terms after which the students were told what each of the initials within the LGBTQi+ meant while the meaning of each word was displayed on the screen. Emelia said:

“There was a slide for what the ‘plus’ means, and they just started randomly saying words that no-one knew, like bestiality.”

The LGBTQi+ training session occurred without teacher supervision, prior parental consent, or proper vetting of the third-party presenter.

Nicki Gaylard, is taking legal action against the South Australian Department for Education over the incident.

Victorian School’s Secret Social Transition Policy

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan who supports teaching five-year-olds gender ideology

In the state of Victoria, the Respectful Relationships programme is mandated statewide by the Department of Education (DoE). In 2023 the school training was quietly updated to include gender identity concepts that include the notion that a child’s body parts may not match their “gender identity” and promote the acceptance and inclusion of trans-identified males in female sports.

The Victorian DoE’s LGBTIQ+ Student Support Policy actively encourages schools to develop a “gender affirmation student support plan” that permits the secret social transitioning of students without parental consent or involvement.

The U.K.’s Cass Review, an independent four-year review of NHS gender identity services addressed the issue regarding the social transitioning of children: changing a child’s name, pronouns, clothing, appearance etc. and found it to be a significant psychosocial step that helps “lock in” a child’s belief that they may be “born in the wrong body” or have a “gender identity” different from their biological sex.

Social transition is known as the “schools to clinic pipeline” because it increases the likelihood that a child or young person will proceed onto puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex modification surgeries.

The Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan defended the teaching of gender identity for children as young as five-years old and framed any opposition to it as “reckless.”

While parent groups including Parents of Adolescents with Gender Distress (PAGD) concerned clinicians and many others argue it creates safeguarding risks and treats contested beliefs as fact.

Corrections Victoria – sexual abuse in women’s prison

In 2007, Clinton Rintoull, murdered a Sudanese refugee, Liep Gony by beating him repeatedly about the head with a metal pole. Rintoull who was 22 at the time was sentenced to 20 years in prison with a non-parole period of 16 years. During his incarceration, Rintoull began to “identify” as a woman and applied to be transferred to the female estate.

Despite prison staff warning Corrections Victoria about the “unacceptable risk” to women prisoners and concerns about his motives for his “trans identification,” it approved Rintoull’s move to the minimum-security women’s prison - HM Tarrengower near Maldon, Victoria in 2022.

Two months after arriving at Tarrengower, Rintoull sexually assaulted a vulnerable female prisoner in the washroom. The victim was a young mother with a baby who was described as “fragile” and with a history of rape and sexual trauma.

The victim filed a civil lawsuit against the Victorian government alleging negligence in the transfer and failure to protect her. In early February 2026 the Victorian government reached a confidential settlement with the victim and paid her an undisclosed amount.

The sexual assault by Rintoull did not result in criminal charges. Just think about that for a moment – a sexual crime is committed by a violent murderer against a woman who is locked in with no means of escape. The prison authorities responsible for protecting all women in their care failed to charge him - nor do they add any extra time to his original sentence - Rintoull was simply moved back to the male prison Langi Kal Kal prison farm near Ballarat from which he was paroled in 2024.

When questioned, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan repeatedly refused to disclose details of the payout, including the amount, whether Rintoull had undergone sex modification surgery (and if so, whether taxpayers funded it), or the decision-making process to move Rintoull to a women’s prison - describing it as a “private matter.”

Clinton Rintoull convicted murderer who sexually assaulted a female prisoner and got away with it.

The Lesbian Action Group in Federal Court in Victoria

Below is a message from the Lesbian Action Group regarding the court case to be held in Victoria on 23 and 24 February.

Please consider donating to LAG’s court costs.

In 2023 LAG applied to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for a five-year temporary exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act (SDA)1984 to hold public events for “lesbians born female.” The AHRC said no and ruled it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of gender identity and stated that “sex is non-binary and changeable.”

LAG then appealed to the Administrative Review Tribunal that upheld the AHRC’s decision in January 2025 and then further appealed to the Federal Court of Australia. LAG’s appeal will be heard over two days - the 23^rd and 24th February in Victoria.

What’s at stake is whether lesbians who by definition are women who are attracted to other women, are allowed to set boundaries based on biological sex, or whether the law now requires lesbians to include men who simply identify as “lesbians” into their dating pools and social spaces.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this case – the court is ruling on whether or not, as a society we still believe in facts, human biology and in the evidence of our own eyes.

LAG’s appeal is directly linked to another important Australian court case – Tickle v Giggle.

In August 2025 LAG was granted leave to intervene in the Full Federal Court appeal of Tickle v Giggle — the landmark case brought by a trans identified man, Roxanne Tickle against Sall Grover and her women-only social media app Giggle for Girls.

The ruling in the first court case was lost by Grover on the grounds of “indirect discrimination”, but Grover appealed this decision which was heard in Sydney at the Federal Court in 2025.

During Grover’s appeal, LAG’s barristers argued that sex is not “non-binary and changeable,” that single-sex spaces are lawful and necessary, and that women and lesbians are entitled to boundaries based on biological reality.

These two cases are now legally and ideologically intertwined. Both turn on the same question: does the SDA protect sex-based rights or has “gender identity” rewritten the meaning of “sex” and “woman” in Australian law and institutional policy.

The ruling may erase the very concept of same-sex attraction if it is now redefined to include males.

LAG refuses to watch the next generation of lesbians be told they must accept heterosexual men in their private and public spaces.

The issues — freedom of association, the proper interpretation of “sex” in Commonwealth law, the limits of anti-discrimination exemptions affect every woman’s group, sporting body, and single-sex service in the country.

The story is still being written. But one thing is clear: the women who built lesbian visibility in the 1970s, 80s and 90s are not prepared to watch it dismantled in the 2020s.

Same fight.

Same sex.

Same rights.