Below is the letter I sent to Martin Breen, editor of the Belfast Telegraph, a few minutes ago.

Dear Martin Breen,

I’m writing to you as editor of the Belfast Telegraph about the disgraceful manner in which your paper has treated Helen Joyce over the past fortnight.

Your paper published Allison Morris’s column attacking Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland as “aligned with right wing, misogynist political agitators” and falsely claimed the group was “heavily funded.” Helen Joyce was then traduced by name on BBC Radio Ulster off the back of that column. When she asked for a right to reply, your paper said only that it would “consider” 600 words. The Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Editors’ Code is explicit on this point: under Clause 1, publications must correct significant inaccuracies “promptly and with due prominence,” and under Clause 2, individuals subject to critical coverage must be given “a fair opportunity to reply to significant inaccuracies.” Your paper did the opposite. A woman falsely smeared on air by one of your own columnists had to come to you cap in hand, and that was as far as your paper’s professionalism stretched.

She wrote it anyway, because WRN NI asked her to. You told her yourself, in your email of Thursday 30 July, that you saw no significant issues with the piece and planned to run it Saturday or Monday. Then nothing. She emailed. WRN NI phoned on her behalf. Nobody replied. She and Maya Forstater flew to Belfast for an event that was cancelled, and only on the Tuesday, after the news moment had passed, after the piece could serve any purpose, did your head of content, Adrian Rutherford, finally write back to reject it. His reasoning was that the piece was “primarily focused on challenging Allison Morris’s credibility and the quality of her journalism, rather than advancing the wider debate.”

You ran the column that started this. You strung her along for a week with a “final scheduling” promise. Then you dropped the piece the moment it stopped being useful to anyone, on the grounds that it dwelt too much on the accuracy of the piece you’d already published. WRN NI is not heavily funded. It’s self-funded, run on volunteers and small donations, while Féile an Phobail, the festival that cancelled their panel, receives £800,000 a year in public money. Morris told a radio audience that JK Rowling funded WRN’s legal action and that you “couldn’t get a sheet of paper” between the group and the far right. Neither claim is true. Helen Joyce is responding to smears and lies. She is not on a personal vendetta. Responsible journalism means checking a claim before you print it, and correcting it once you know it’s false. That is not what your paper did with Morris’s column, and it is not what your paper did when Helen tried to put the record straight.

That’s a paper backing its liar over the truth, and over the woman that liar smeared.

I don’t expect you to publish this either. So I’ll be putting it on my own site, in full, along with an account of what happened to Helen Joyce and the piece the Belfast Telegraph didn’t have the nerve to run.

Graham Linehan

The piece the Belfast Telegraph rejected

On July 27th Allison Morris wrote about Féile an Phobail cancelling a panel organised by Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland because it “campaigns against rights for the Transgender community”. Morris slurred the grassroots group as “aligned with right wing, misogynist political agitators”, and falsely claimed they were “heavily funded”. Fiona McAnena, my colleague at human rights charity Sex Matters, was among the speakers.

On July 28th, when Morris and I appeared on BBC Radio Talkback, Morris doubled down. She claimed JK Rowling funded WRN’s legal action against Féile, that “you couldn’t get a sheet of paper” between me and WRN and the “far right”, and that our supporters were “the same people that were cheering on attacks on migrants”.

In fact, WRN NI self-funded its legal action. It subsists on tiny donations and volunteers’ time, while Féile receives £800,000 annually from the taxpayer. As for our “far right” position, it’s simply that humans come in two sexes, and acknowledging this matters for women’s rights.

This position is held by almost everyone: both sexes, all ages, all politics, every faith and none. Polling last year found that 72% of Northern Irish voters supported the UK Supreme Court ruling that trans identification doesn’t change a person’s legal sex, including majorities of Unionist and Sinn Fein voters.

And anyone can play guilt by association. I could point out that Morris’s position on this issue is shared by those waving banners at London Trans+ Pride on July 25th calling for Rowling to be murdered and women like me to be gassed. It’s shared by the trans-identifying man convicted in 2024 for telling me that he would love to rip my eyes out, chop my hands off and carve my face up. But I wouldn’t stoop so low.

Morris observes that most violence against women is in the home. But that’s because the home is where bad men have easiest access to women, and women are least able to escape. Thinking this means it’s safe to let men into women-only public spaces is as silly as saying that because most traffic accidents involving pedestrians happen on local and regional roads, we can all go for strolls on motorways.

Of course keeping trans-identifying men out of women’s spaces won’t stop all violence against women. But it will stop some, and I think that’s worth it. This is the position Morris misrepresents, in a parody unworthy of a serious journalist, as women like me claiming that public toilets are “the most dangerous place on earth for women, with trans predators lurking in every cubicle”.

On Talkback, Morris insisted my position requires believing that “all trans women are deviants and sex offenders”. No: just that they are men, that some men harm women and that if you make it easier for men to enter spaces where women are vulnerable, some of those who take advantage will indeed be “deviants and sex offenders”.

As Morris herself said, sex offenders are “the most devious people on earth”, befriending single mothers online and becoming priests and football coaches to gain access to victims. Why she can’t see that some will claim to be women for the same reason is a mystery to me.

I know of hundreds of cases where men who claim to be women have entered women-only spaces, from toilets and changing rooms to mental health support groups and prisons, and harmed women by exposing themselves, watching those women undress and in the worst cases, assaulting and raping women.

Morris writes that she is “baffled” by our position. I suggest she takes the time-honoured journalistic approach of sitting down with WRN NI, asking good-faith questions and listening to the answers.

Helen Joyce is a former staff journalist at The Economist, where she held many posts including Brazil correspondent, Finance editor and Britain editor. She is the author of the best-selling “Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights” and now works for the human-rights charity Sex Matters.

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Australia used to be the most masculine place on Earth. Cheerful men wrestling crocodiles, spiders the size of plates, big knives. Then the country seemed to catch sight of itself and flinch. It overcorrected so hard, for so long, that it’s landed somewhere worse than where it started, a place that isn’t masculine at all, and isn’t especially fond of women either.

It has now produced the single most prissy, censorious legal document I’ve read all year, and the crime it punishes is a woman calling a man a man.

Kirralie Smith runs Binary Australia, a campaign group that argues, among other things, that women’s football should involve women. In early 2023 she noticed that a men’s league footballer called Nicholas Blanch was playing on a women’s team in Wingham, and that another player, Justin Dennis, was doing the same in Sydney. She said so. She called Blanch “a bloke in a frock.” She asked, in her own words, why parents should be “put in the terrible situation of having to deal with an adult man in their daughter’s bathroom.”

For this, the NSW Local Court found her guilty of “unlawful vilification.” Last week the Supreme Court of New South Wales upheld the finding on appeal. Smith and Binary Australia now owe Blanch and Dennis a combined $95,000, due within 28 days, doubling if she’s late. Blanch also got an Apprehended Violence Order against her. Dennis tried for one too, despite the two of them living over 200 miles apart and having never met, evidently confident the system would take his word for it. For months, it did. Police served the order and the case was set down for a hearing, and it was only withdrawn on the morning it was due to be heard.

Remember, these are two cheating, abusive men. Not confused, not misunderstood, not on some brave personal journey, just grown men who worked out that women’s football has weaker tackles and smaller goalkeepers and turned up accordingly.

None of that is the funny part. The funny part is Annexure A.

Annexure A is the statement the court has ordered Smith to publish, pinned to the top of every social media account she controls, and featured on the Binary Australia homepage, for three months. In it, she must announce to the world that she has “contravened section 38S of the Anti-Discrimination Act” and “incited hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of” two footballers, by means of calling them men. She’s also banned from doing it again. The ruling doesn’t specify what word she’s meant to use instead. That’s the fun part she has to work out on her own, like the rest of us. Perhaps when the full text of the statement is released, we’ll find out what word we are supposed to use for people with dicks who insist on playing women’s sports.

Justice Belinda Rigg, who wrote the ruling, insists the point isn’t to stigmatise or shame Smith. Then in the next breath, she explains that she wants the statement seen by “a meaningful number of [Smith’s] followers, including those who recall the impugned posts,” so they can witness what she calls the “announcement of guilt.”

That’s not a legal remedy. That’s the village square. That’s the stocks. Australia has reintroduced the stocks as a punishment for uppity women.

Meanwhile Dennis, the goal-scorer who injured two female opponents in a single match (a separate double leg fracture in the same league was down to a different Flying Bats player), got a new alias. After the complaints piled up, Football NSW simply stopped printing his name on the match stats and started calling him “Inter Player.” His new club, the Flying Bats, won every one of their 17 matches last season, scoring 76 goals and conceding 8, which is a cricket score, not a football score.

This is what the country looks like now. A woman gets a $95,000 fine and a compelled confession for saying a man is a man. A man who hurt women on a pitch gets a pseudonym and a trophy. Club presidents who floated boycotting matches against sides with male players were threatened with “disciplinary action” by the two men running the competition, Matthew Geracitano and John Tsatsimas. A few months earlier, the Full Federal Court had already found Sall Grover guilty of direct discrimination for keeping a man off her woman-only app, Giggle for Girls, and doubled her damages to $20,000 with costs capped at $100,000 for good measure. She’s now seeking leave to appeal to the High Court. Somewhere in between, the eSafety Commissioner quietly leaned on Facebook to remove Smith’s page, 47,000 followers gone, no ruling required.

Australia can no longer be called the most masculine place on Earth, but it didn’t drift from macho to metropolitan. It skipped straight past and rebuilt the stocks for a new medieval age. In the Australia Julia Gillard created, when a woman rings the alarm, the country’s institutions rush in, not to help her, but to cut off the sound. Smith’s punishment is so every other woman knows what happens if she rings one too.

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First the good news: after four years of being suspended, investigated and publicly smeared for speaking out on the harms of gender medicine, the Queensland Children’s Hospital and Health Service (CHQ HHS) has settled its four-year-long ‘dispute’ with child and adolescent psychiatrist, Dr Jillian Spencer.

CHQ HHS issued a public statement that was a tightly scripted case study in lawyerly arse-covering: a textbook example of strategic obfuscation, bureaucratic language games, plausible deniability and inference. The statement appears conciliatory but concedes almost nothing - it’s semantic shapeshifting of the highest order.

Dr Spencer is a whistleblower who raised legitimate concerns about the lack of robust evidence and the risk of harm to children receiving gender treatment at the hospital’s gender clinic. But CHQ framed this as a mere ‘dispute’ to obscure the true significance of the outcome. This was a veiled admission of the hospital’s failure to properly safeguard vulnerable children – but you’d have to look hard to work this out. The statement fails entirely to say what happened and why in order to sidestep the substantive issues in question.

Denying the evidence base

Queensland’s gender clinic follows the affirmation model for treating children with gender dysphoria. Under this approach a child’s declared transgender identity is immediately affirmed including social transition (changing name, pronouns, clothing and validation at school and home), followed by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and in some cases surgeries such as vaginoplasty, phalloplasty and double mastectomies.

Dr Jillian Spencer supports a cautious watchful waiting medical model that emphasises exploratory therapy through assessment and treatment of underlying comorbidities such as autism, depression, trauma, anxiety and family breakdown, rather than social or medical transition. It supports young people through their psychological, sexual and emotional development while preserving their future options and bodily integrity.

The press statement concedes that Dr Spencer is right, not because she has special knowledge, but because she followed the evidence as it emerged in multiple systematic, gold‑standard reviews in the U.K., Finland, Norway, Denmark and the United States.

While Dr Spencer insisted on the core principle: first Do No Harm and to heed the growing international calls for caution, the hospital downplayed the evidence and chose to shoot the messenger instead.

The institutional scapegoating of Dr Spencer involved many individuals both inside and outside the hospital while the statement flattens these into a faceless blob, erasing personal accountability. Let’s not forget the following:

• Professional colleagues who, despite sending private messages of agreement did not raise concerns or speak out themselves, ensuring Dr Spencer was isolated and could be portrayed as the ‘troublemaker’.

• Fellow psychiatrists in the College of Psychiatrists and clinicians in APHRA and RANZCP whose job it is to learn from the history of previous medical scandals - all driven by iatrogenic harm and a refusal to question the overvalued beliefs of patients, a God-complex of medical ‘pioneers’ and the power of social contagion.

• The LGBTQi+ gender doctors and healthcare workers with a Telfer-like certainty in the affirmation model who publicly disparage, downplay and dismiss evidence-based reviews they characterise as “flawed”, “transphobic”, or motivated by “right wing” prejudice.

• The hospital’s trans “allies” wearing rainbow lanyards and Pride pins on the hunt for evidence of wrongthink who label disagreement or doubt as “harmful.” The pronoun police, the flag wavers, the finger pointers and the scolds – an army of little spies who foster a toxic culture of compliance, fear, subservience, cowardice and anxiety.

• HR managers, hospital administrators and Board members who ignored their core safeguarding responsibilities in order to protect the institution even at the expense of vulnerable patients and distressed parents.

Dr Spencer endured a four-year campaign of institutional bullying, vilification and procedural hounding. The personal, emotional and psychological price has been profound as a mother of two and family breadwinner not knowing whether she would lose her licence to practice. They say the process is the punishment and for Dr Spencer the process was relentless, brutal and designed to break her.

Yet the attacks were never really about her personally. In questioning the hospital’s medical model Dr Spencer posed an existential threat to the institution’s credibility. The real dispute was over whether the hospital’s treatment of gender-dysphoric children was evidence-based and in the best interests of the patients, or whether it was ideologically driven, and caused patients irreversible damage.

Rhetorical Misdirection

The language in the press release is neutral, measured and abstract: written in the passive voice of institutional gaslighting by lawyers and bureaucrats over weeks of painstaking, word-by-word negotiation. The purpose of the statement is to concede as little as possible while maintaining plausible deniability in case of future litigation. Here are some of its key clauses:

Since 2022, CHQ HHS and Dr Jillian Spencer have been in dispute in relation to the Gender Service policy approach to gender treatment for children and adolescents and Dr Spencer’s clinical concerns and public statements on that topic.

Framing the issue as a “dispute” in relation to its “policy approach” downgrades a substantive clinical and ethical question to a mere “administrative difference”. This minimises the significance of the different models and obfuscates the serious patient safety concerns.

Dr Spencer and CHQ HHS confirm that those disputes have now been settled.

This is deflection and gaslighting. It conflates two separate issues: Dr Spencer’s suspension from her clinical duties has been resolved. But her challenge regarding the different clinical approaches has not.

Does the hospital stand by the affirmation model? It’s still not clear. If social transition is not a ‘neutral act’, if puberty blockers are not ‘fully reversible’ and if medicalisation risks regret and lifelong harm, parents and children need to know.

CHQ HHS has agreed to make this statement as part of that settlement.

It’s safe to assume the hospital’s preferred option was to resolve this dispute in private and that Dr Spencer’s team insisted - no settlement without a public statement to clear her name and reputation. The process from that point on was a brutal line-by-line negotiation.

CHQ settled because, despite four years of painstaking investigations over multiple accusations, there was not one shred of evidence that Dr Spencer was ‘transphobic’ or might cause ‘harm’ to vulnerable patients.

The hospital faced a public court hearing in which its methods for silencing Dr Spencer would be exposed. But more importantly, a court case would include reviewing the evidence base for the different clinical methods in which the affirmation model would be debunked in multiple reviews. A court case would also highlight that the Cass Review rated the Australian Standards of Care for gender medicine 18 out of 100 for their ‘lack of rigour’ in development, poor evidence review and lack of editorial independence.

Cass found ‘little or no evidence’ for the efficacy of puberty blockers, urged extreme caution for prescribing cross-sex hormones, debunked the risk of suicide and warned that social transition ‘locks in’ a child’s trans identification. The Cass Review has been downplayed by every Australian medical body: it’s not only CHQ on the line – it’s the entire medical establishment.

CHQ HHS confirms that Dr Spencer has concluded her employment with CHQ HHS.

This creates a false equivalence as if Dr Spencer and the hospital are equal partners and not a whistleblower silenced by a powerful institution that did everything in its power to discredit her.

Dr Spencer did not ‘conclude’ her employment, she resigned. The hospital attempts to save face by refusing to give her a moral victory - this is petty and mean-spirited.

The CHQ HHS acknowledges that these are matters of legitimate professional and public debate, and that clinicians play an important role in raising concerns about patient safety and clinical practice.

This phrasing removes Dr Spencer entirely from the narrative. It’s not “clinicians” (plural) it was one clinician - Dr Spencer who was rewarded by being subjected to a four-year campaign of institutional bullying for doing so.

“Clinical practice” is a deliberate minimising euphemism- this is not a minor technical disagreement but a fundamental disagreement over the two models.

Similarly, “raising concerns about patient safety” sanitises the gravity of what’s at stake: sterilisation, regret and lifelong harm for children who may be suffering from a range of comorbidities or social contagion.

Dr Spencer has been a strong advocate for change in Queensland in the model of care for children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria. One of the features of the clinical approach that Dr Spencer has sought is the delay in medical interventions for such patients until adulthood, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, because they are serious decisions regarding their body and long-term health.

Here is a tiny partial vindication - Dr Spencer is a “strong advocate” concerned about “serious decisions”. Yes indeed. There is nothing more serious than sterilising vulnerable children. The “model of care” and “clinical approach” are treated as if they are neutral and technical – they are neither.

While watchful waiting is not a “delay” but a clinical pathway - there is no mention that 80-90 percent of adolescents resolve their dysphoria when treated under this model.

CHQ HHS accepts that Dr Spencer’s concerns were grounded in her training and background as an experienced child and adolescent psychiatrist.

The key verb here is “accepts that” - it is not “agrees with” or “acknowledges the truth of”.

The hospital is merely tolerating her view not endorsing it – more plausible deniability and a refusal to engage with the serious issues of medical harm.

“Grounded in her training and background” shifts the narrative from; she’s right because the evidence supports Dr Spencer’s view (and the international community) to, ‘she’s right because she’s credentialed’.

This faming invalidates parents, detransitioners and critics of the affirmation model that hold the exact same view, based not on their ‘training’ but on a careful reading of the evidence, the history of iatrogenic contagions and an understanding what it is to be human.

In 2025, in accordance with the Health Service Directive titled ‘Treatment of Gender Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents with Hormone Therapy’ dated 28 January 2025 and Ministerial Directions titled ‘Treatment of Gender Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents with Hormone Therapy’ dated 28 October 2025 and 15 January 2026, the State Government effected a temporary pause on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in the treatment of new patients in Hospital and Health Services across Queensland.”

What is hidden under the layers of officialese, bureaucratic qualifications, dates and titles is the fact that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones were banned in Queensland. The hospital direct attention away from a major evidence-based retreat by framing it as a “temporary pause” after which it implies normal service will resume.

“New patients” is an admission that current patients may well remain on an affirmation pathway.

CHQ HHS acknowledges that health practitioners must take a clinical approach to the treatment of gender dysphoria that focuses on the best available research and the child’s best interests rather than directing a child down a pre-determined treatment pathway.

An implicit admission that clinicians at the QGC may not have taken a clinical approach that focuses on “the best available research” and the child’s “best interest”.

A chilling admission of clinical failure with zero accountability.

CHQ HHS also acknowledges Dr Spencer’s service and her contributions to child and adolescent psychiatry during her tenure.

The most cynical line in the entire statement: it airbrushes out a four-year campaign of bullying that included suspension, show-cause notices, misconduct findings, attempts to terminate Spencer’s employment and public and private attacks on her character.

This is tokenistic praise that seeks to memory-hole the hospital’s characterisation of Spencer as a ‘troublemaker’ and replace it with the ‘good doctor’. This is moral inversion and gaslighting to appear gracious while failing to admit it did everything possible to destroy Dr Spencer’s reputation as a good doctor in the first place.

All disciplinary proceedings against Dr Spencer have been discontinued.

This is cynical indeed; ‘discontinued’ and ‘at this point in time’ infer Dr Spencer may be found guilty of wrongdoing at some other point in time, perhaps in the future? It is mealy mouthed and non-committal, neither a full exoneration nor an admission of failure on the part of the hospital.

The terms of the resolution are confidential.

Yes of course they are. Public scrutiny would expose the cost to taxpayers of a four-year public hounding of a principled doctor and whistleblower abandoned by her colleagues and professional bodies including RANCZP, APHRA and the College of Psychiatrists.

I hope the terms of the resolution include an eye-watering financial settlement, but I very much doubt it.

Dr Spencer commented on the QCH statement to say:

“The most important part of the statement is admitting that this is an important professional and public debate and doctors have an important role in raising patient safety concerns. We’ve had such a stifling culture of silence in Australia because of APHRA and the College of Psychiatrists who persecute those who speak out.

I get an awful lot of support from doctors privately but unfortunately, they’re too scared to speak up and that leaves people like me to take all the heat on behalf of the profession which isn’t fair as it’s a profession wide issue and should be tackled as such.”

Over four long years, Dr Spencer built a robust evidence-based refutation of the affirmation model by settling the Queensland hospital is protecting the politicians, Board members, clinicians and LGBTQi+ lobby groups from this seeing the light of day.

Yet the silencing and hounding of doctors continues; psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos has been gagged by APHRA from also speaking out about his clinical concerns on gender medicine, even though Dr Spencer has been vindicated. While Dr Spencer was a scapegoat, she may also be being used as a decoy. Why indeed is Dr Amos still being punished?

In Australia dissent regarding gender medicine continues to be managed quietly through institutional scapegoating, censorship, public shaming and threats of professional sanctions.

It’s high time more doctors, psychiatrists and healthcare professionals found their voices and the courage and speak out.

What’s Next?

We are still waiting for the long-promised review commissioned by Mark Butler, the Federal Health Minister. One can only imagine the bargaining, the activist pressure, the lobbying, the anxiety behind the scenes. No doubt an army of lawyerly communicators are polishing off their PR skills to hide the real story of what happened, why it happened and who is responsible.

Queensland is a strategic move in a bigger chess game that relies on playing language games to misdirect the entire population.

Elections are coming, Minsters will move to new roles, the heads of departments will move on or retire, the rainbow lanyards will be replaced by something else until there will be no one left to hold accountable for the medical battery of our children.

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Ann Widdecombe was found dead at her home in Haytor on the edge of Dartmoor on 9 July. She had missed a television interview the previous afternoon. Police described serious injuries and a brutal attack on a 78-year-old woman in her own house. By 13 July, counter-terrorism officers had taken over the investigation, and a 28-year-old man from Rotherham was in custody under a warrant of further detention.

At some point in the days that followed, Hope Not Hate deleted its page about her.

The page was called “Who is Ann Widdecombe?” and it set out what the organisation described as her “long history of homophobic and sexist remarks”, and her embrace of what it called “dangerous and divisive politics”. Their statement about the deletion said the removal reflected no change in their approach, and that scrutinising the public records of politicians is legitimate and essential work which will continue.

Nothing has changed. What they mean is that nothing has changed about them, which is true. Ann Widdecombe, on the other hand, has changed a good deal, having moved from the column marked ‘living’ to the other one, and the whole of the UK changed upon hearing the news, as they immediately realised what the country had suddenly lost.

The State of Hate

Hope Not Hate’s annual report, State of Hate 2026, came out in March, and she’s on page 115 of it. Not her own entry this time. She appears in the profile of Richie Allen, a Salford broadcaster whose show grew out of David Icke’s channel and who still has Icke on to explain that reality was built by vampires. She’s present as one of the mainstream politicians Allen has platformed, in a list that also holds two Holocaust deniers, the neo-Nazi Mark Collett, the hate preacher Anjem Choudary, and Sir Desmond Swayne.

Swayne is the one who tells you how this works. He has been the Conservative MP for New Forest West since 1997, and in November 2020 he went on Allen’s show to say that Covid was serious but that people needed a sense of proportion. Hope Not Hate revealed it that January and wrote publicly to the Chief Whip demanding he be suspended. Their own article conceded there was no evidence Swayne knew anything about Allen’s views or his previous guests.

So that’s the list. Two Holocaust deniers, a neo-Nazi, an Islamist hate preacher, a backbencher who took a booking about lockdown, and a 78-year-old woman who was just killed in her home. It was published in March and it’s still up, on a website run by people who understand perfectly well what a list of names does, because assembling lists of names is their entire business.

The milieu

Section 8 of State of Hate 2026 is headed ANTI-LGBTQ+, and it runs alongside sections on Patriotic Alternative and the fascist Homeland Party. Inside it you’ll find the Scottish Family Party, the Family Education Trust, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, and Fair Cop.

Fair Cop is Harry Miller’s organisation. It was “established to protect police officers who face disciplinary issues for expressing anti-trans, misogynistic and other anti-LGBTQ+ views”, they write, and Miller started it in 2019 “after he was investigated for posting anti-trans content on social media”. That’s a striking way to describe a group founded by a man who in February 2020 won a High Court ruling that Humberside Police had acted unlawfully in recording a non-crime hate incident against him for tweeting about the Gender Recognition Act, and who won again at the Court of Appeal against the College of Policing in December 2021.

He is not mentioned in the document as having won. In an earlier version, published three months after his Court of Appeal victory, they called him “a police officer critiqued for transphobic tweets” and left it there. They’ve since corrected the ‘former’. They have not found room for the judgments.

But we do get a little glimpse of how the sausage is made. Fair Cop, they write, has “strong links to the far right and the broader ‘gender critical’ milieu”.

It’s one sentence with two halves, far right on one side, gender critical on the other. Holding them together is the phrase “and the broader”, which does no logical work at all and all of the dirty work. It never asserts that gender-critical women are far right, it just puts them in the same clause and lets grammar do what an accusation would have to prove. And the scare quotes around ‘gender critical’ tell the reader that the term itself is a costume, that the women wearing it are pretending to be something.

The same care went into ‘milieu’. Not movement, not campaign, and certainly not the several hundred thousand British women who don’t want men in their changing rooms, prisons, shelters and sports. It’s a word that lets you avoid saying who, or how many, or what a single one of them actually thinks.

Kellie-Jay gets her own entry in all three reports, and in the 2023 wording you can watch the method set. She is, they write, “a leading voice in the anti-trans movement in the UK”, and she has “increasingly found support from and an overlap in views with the far right”. Not that she is far right, mind you. That she overlaps with it. It’s built to dodge litigation and it’s built to be quoted without the qualifiers, and by 2025 that’s exactly what had happened. A peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Gender Studies told its readers that Keen-Minshull “was identified in the 2023 report by the UK anti-racist advocacy group ‘Hope Not Hate’ as a key British figure within far-right agitation”. The hedge evaporated between the report and the footnote, as it was designed to. And peer review caught none of it, because peer review in gender studies means being waved through by people who look like Batman villains. “An overlap in views with” does not turn into “a key figure within” by accident. Somebody preferred the stronger sentence, and Hope Not Hate had built them a citation to hang it on.

Albert Park

State of Hate 2023 was published on 26 February. Four weeks later, on 25 March, Kellie-Jay walked into Albert Park in Auckland to hold a Let Women Speak event. Somewhere between 150 and 200 people had come to hear her. Around 2,000 had come to stop her, among them the co-leader of New Zealand’s Green Party.

She never spoke. She had tomato juice poured over her at the rotunda and was escorted out by police through a crowd that had begun pulling down the barriers, and she abandoned the rest of the tour.

In the same crowd, a 20-year-old man punched a 71-year-old woman named Judith Hobson three times in the head. She was concussed, with bruising to her eye and behind her left ear. He was discharged without conviction, the judge citing, among other things, his neurodiversity.

Hope Not Hate’s work is done long before any particular crowd assembles, whether it contains one or one hundred neurodivergent men, and it goes on working long after. They supply the sentence that says the woman on the stage overlaps in views with fascists, and they supply it with a charity number attached and a research department behind it, which is what makes it quotable. Once a sentence like that exists it’s available to anybody who wants a reason, including a 20-year-old who has given himself permission to punch an elderly woman three times in the head, or a 28-year-old who has given himself permission to kill one.

That is what the word ‘milieu’ is for. It’s a licence to inflict physical harm, drawn up by Hope Not Hate. It says these are not individual women with individual arguments that have to be individually weighed. They are a diffuse contaminating presence, and you may treat any given specimen of it accordingly.

The Missing Women

The most interesting thing about these reports is the names that aren’t in them.

Across all three reports, something over 225,000 words, the following names appear zero times. Maya Forstater. Helen Joyce. Kathleen Stock. J.K. Rowling. Julie Bindel. LGB Alliance. Sex Matters. Woman’s Place UK. For Women Scotland. And no mention of me, which is odd. Am I not the most terrible transphobe who ever lived?

They have written at length about a ‘milieu’ whose most prominent members they never name.

There are two explanations and neither convinces you you’re dealing with people of good character. The first is that they’ve considered these women carefully and concluded they have nothing to do with the far right, in which case the ‘milieu’ is one women’s rights activist and one retired police officer, and they might have said so. The second is that Forstater has already beaten an employer in a tribunal on precisely this ground, For Women Scotland won in the Supreme Court in April last year, and Rowling has the money to make them prove any of it. So you write about the ‘milieu’ instead. Nobody can sue you for describing a contaminating presence, because a contaminating presence has no name to clear.

The lists have never really been findings. Sir William Shawcross’s 2023 review of Prevent revealed that counter-extremism officials had been shown material from a Hope Not Hate dossier on the extreme right wing which named Rod Liddle, Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray as journalists guilty of mainstreaming far-right ideas. Murray has since said that after he criticised the organisation, it approached him and offered to leave his name off the next one if he took his article down.

Please talk about Obama

Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister on Monday. His first significant appointment, briefed to journalists with heavy emphasis on his time working for the Obama campaign, is Matthew McGregor as Director of Political Strategy. McGregor is a former director of Hope Not Hate.

Burnham’s people would rather talk about Obama. Of course they would.

For twenty years, Hope Not Hate have told the country that identifying extremism is their professional competence, that this is why the Home Office should fund them and why counter-terrorism officials should read what they write. And in that decade, their considered professional judgement has been that the danger lies with a woman who wants her local refuge to stay female, and that she belongs in a document with Anjem Choudary, and that the correct word for her and everyone like her is a ‘milieu’.

Meanwhile, the violence has been arriving from the other direction, and it keeps arriving, and it is almost never called what it is.

Maria MacLachlan, assaulted at Speaker’s Corner in 2017. Julie Bindel, ambushed outside an Edinburgh lecture hall in 2019 by a man it took three security men to pull away. Fred Sargeant, 74 and disabled, slapped about the head and doused in coffee at a Vermont Pride parade in 2022, an event that exists because of him. Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern in 2024, told by marchers that one belonged at the bottom of the Rhine and the other on the fire. And Charlie Kirk, of course. And now Ann Widdecombe.

You cannot spend ten years telling the state which of its citizens are a contaminating presence and then act surprised when somebody does something about it. Since Hope Not Hate’s creation, whether they know it or not, they have been working into a tizzy a particular kind of young man. Isolated, obsessive, often autistic or describing himself as neurodivergent, drawn to their work because it offers a moral universe a toddler could understand. Give a man like that a name, the authority of a charity and the word ‘hate’, and he will travel like a bullet until he meets something. Last week one of them travelled the better part of three hundred miles to a farmhouse on Dartmoor.

Who is Ann Widdecombe? It was always a strange question to put at the top of a dossier, because the whole country knew the answer. An MP for 23 years. A minister of the Crown. A woman of a faith she took seriously and defended without embarrassment, who wrote novels, campaigned for prisoners and animals, and let Anton du Beke haul her round a dance floor for the nation’s entertainment because she was never afraid of looking ridiculous. You could disagree with every position she ever held and still see what she was: a person who said what she believed under her own name, to your face. Which is more than can be said for the authors of an anonymous page, deleted in the night, by people who judge themselves fit to judge the rest of us.

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If anybody needed more evidence that gender identity ideology is, at its core, little more than political sophistry, words filled with air, rhetorical sleights of hand, linguistic distortions, propaganda, thought-terminating clichés, Orwellian doublespeak, loaded language, euphemisms and mumbo jumbo aimed at dismantling material reality, they need look no further than the ruling on 15 May 2026 when three Australian Federal Court Justices; Melissa Perry, Wendy Abraham and Geoffrey Kennett pronounced biological sex secondary to a man’s self-declared “gender identity.”

The ruling in the Giggle v Tickle appeal case found entrepreneur Sall Grover guilty of direct discrimination against Roxanne Tickle, a trans-identified man for refusing access to her female-only app because she:

“…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. Federal Court Justice Perry

The “characteristics” were shoulder-length hair and V-neck t-shirt.

The Court’s ruling is a major win in a decades-long political campaign by trans activists to subordinate biological reality for subjective self-identification in law, policy and public life when three senior court Justices ignored the incoherent and obvious implications for short-haired women and men in V-neck t-shirts by prioritising performative “allyship” over coherent legal reasoning.

The Justices, along with many sex realist women, were in the same courtroom - it was clear Tickle was a man. Everybody with eyes and ears could tell. But Justice Perry took it upon herself as lead judge to put us straight - for Perry, Tickle belonged in that rare class of women most in need of protection - a ‘trans woman.’

Following the judgement, U.K. barrister Dennis Kavanagh posted on X:

“Denying the existence of gender identity’ is now basically unlawful in Australia. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more chilling and sinister in a judgment from a common law legal system.”

Queering the world

All ideologies share the same dialectic structure:

This is the world as it currently it - oppressive, unjust and in need of liberation through political and social revolution.

Here is the world as it should be: progressive, just, and inclusive once everybody submits to the foundational truths revealed by the ideology’s founders.

Gender ideology follows this structure:

The world is an oppressive, CIS heteronormative, capitalist system that forces people into rigid, binary sex categories.

But there is a deeper gnostic truth: It’s not biology but gender identity that reveals who we really are. Medical interventions are necessary to realign the (wrong) body with the (correct) gender identity. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Some people are neither.

This is the vision of queer activists like Spanish philosopher Preciado (a female-to-male transsexual):

“I am taking testosterone as a political experiment. This is not a transition. This is not a conversion. This is hacking the body. I am my own guinea pig. I am producing a new subjectivity... In the pharmacopornographic era, the body is the ultimate biotechnological platform. Hormones are molecular prostheses that allow us to hack the gender code... We are all pharmacopornographic subjects.”

The Bill of Gender Rights - the legal blueprint

During a humid week in August 1992 at the Hilton Southwest in Texas, 50 transgender activists that included lawyers, HR professionals and judges attended the inaugural International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy (ICTLEP).

The aim of the conference was to strategize on law and policy reform while a small select group worked on a draft that became the template for every legislative or policy change across the West. The group drafted the Bill of Gender Rights that was ratified a few years later and comprised the sacred tenets of gender identity ideology:

Right to Self-Definition of Gender Identity

All human beings carry within themselves an ever-unfolding idea of who they are and what they are capable of achieving. The individual’s sense of self is not determined by chromosomal sex, genitalia, assigned birth sex, or initial gender role. Thus, the individual’s identity and capabilities cannot be circumscribed by what society deems to be masculine or feminine behaviour.

Gender ideology’s foundational metaphysical claim - the true self is decoupled from embodied biological sex and is ‘ever-unfolding.’

What they are capable of achieving – ‘medical transition’ becomes a noble ‘achievement’ and dissent (sex as binary) is framed as a denial of someone’s full potential.

This clause borrows the moral prestige of second wave feminism - ‘gender is not limited to sex stereotypes’ that became: ‘sex itself is a stereotype’ socially constructed through language and ‘performance’.

Right to Define and Redefine Gender Identity

It is fundamental that individuals have the right to define, and to redefine as their lives unfold, their own gender identities, without regard to chromosomal sex, genitalia, assigned birth sex, or initial gender role.

Self ID and to change gender markers at will. This dismantles accurate record keeping and the right for single-sex spaces and services.

Birth sex is framed as a ‘gender role’ while ‘gender identity’ is the real thing.

Right to Gender Expression

Given that gender is a fundamental aspect of a person’s identity, each individual has the right to express their gender identity by matching their outward gender presentation (clothing, mannerisms, speech patterns, etc.) with their internal sense of self. This right includes the ability to express gender in ways that may not conform to societal expectations of what is “appropriate” for one’s assigned birth sex.

‘Gender’ is the Trojan Horse; presented as innate, fundamental and stable rather than cultural roles built on top of sex (masculine, feminine).

But gender is also used as ‘external presentation’ - shifting it from an ‘essence’ to a ‘performance’. The shifting meaning of ‘gender’ is deliberate; it creates cognitive confusion and uses ‘gender as innate’ as moral weight for men’s demand to be accepted ‘as women.’

Right to Access Gendered Spaces and Activities

All people have the right to use gendered spaces and participate in gendered activities in accordance with their gender identity.

The central intention of the Bill: ‘gender rights’ supersede women’s historical rights for same-sex provisions where they matter most.

All people – the universalist claim of human rights which sounds egalitarian but is unidirectional and meets the demands of a tiny cohort of paraphilic men. Women demanding men’s right to prisons, sports and spaces is not being contested.

Right to Medical Care

All people have the right to safe and effective medical care, including the right to access medical procedures and treatments that modify physical characteristics to better express their gender identity.

The ‘right’ for affirmation-only medical model borrows from the liberal feminist slogan ‘my body my choice’ and obscures the fact that these are unproven and unethical medical interventions on healthy bodies (castration, cross-sex hormones). ‘Safe and effective’ hides the reality of long-term physical and psychological harm.

Right to Legal Recognition

All people have the right to change their legal name and gender designation on all official documents without undue burden or restriction.

Self ID on demand, no gatekeeping, no doctor’s reports, no requirement to medicalise or change external appearance.

Decouples official records from material reality: births, deaths and marriage, healthcare records, passports, driver’s licences, media reporting, census data, crime statistics.

Right to Marriage

All people have the right to marry the person of their choice, regardless of the gender or sex of either party.

Shifts the basis of attraction and marriage based on biological reality and erases homosexuality based on same-sex attraction.

Right to Parent

All people have the right to bear or adopt children and to parent in accordance with their gender identity, without discrimination.

Mothering and parenting rights are to be based on gender identity, not biological sex. The right for men to be ‘mothers’ via hormones that stimulate ‘breast tissue’ and synthetic lactation to ‘feed’ infants.

The Houston Bill is a linguistic Ponzi scheme that relies on a single proposition – an innate gender identity on which an edifice of dependent beliefs, assumptions and presuppositions rest.

But the history of trans activism has proven the Bill to be a stroke of strategic genius: by couching a radical new category - that of ‘trans people’ in the moralising language of ‘rights,’ gender ideology hijacked the legal and policy-making institutions to enforce compliance across the whole of society.

The Transsexual Vision

The Houston Bill was written by six men who shared a strikingly similar trajectory: heterosexual marriage, children, a midlife ‘coming out’ and an autogynephilic identification as a woman. These men were:

Phillis Randolph Frye (born Phillip in 1948), a lieutenant in the U.S. Army who became the first transgender judge in Houston. Phillip’s first wife divorced him after she discovered his secret crossdressing.

Sharon Ann Stuart (born Thomas Heitz in 1940) served as a Marine married and had four children with his wife Ginger. Stuart identified as bi-gender and used both male and female names, trained as a lawyer he became a committed trans activist.

JoAnn Roberts (born 1948 no birth name available) was a short, bald Italian from Philadelphia who collected model trains, married, fathered a daughter and penned practical guides for couples titled; Coping with Crossdressing for Couples.

Susan Stryker (born 1961) said his marriage “blew up” after his wife discovered him cross dressing. Stryker established the field of transgender studies and co-directed Screaming Queens; a revisionist documentary of the 1996 Compton Cafeteria riot that downplayed the role of gay men and lesbians and he became a queer theorist.

Martine Rothblatt (born Martin in 1954) - an entrepreneur who founded Sirius Satellite Radio (now SiriusXM) and United Therapeutics, a medical biotech firm. Rothblatt is an activist billionaire who transitioned at age 40 after fathering four children. Rothblatt opposed the U.S. “bathroom bills” and founded the Terasem Movement to advance transhumanism and technology-driven mind uploading.

A sixth figure, Jan Eaton, an attendee at the conference and cited co-author on early drafts left no trace in the public records.

Fast forward to Australia’s 2013 amendments to the SDA that replaced ‘sex’ with gender identity defined as:

“…the gender-related identity, appearance or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of a person (whether by way of medical intervention or not), with or without regard to the person’s designated sex at birth.”

This is straight out of the Houston Bill. Gender identity was coined in the U.S. sexology clinics of the 60s as a way to explain the belief a transsexual man had that he was really a woman ‘inside’ as well as being a tautology, it means that ‘gender identity is your gender stuff, regardless of your sex’.

That this circular rhetorical nonsense was accepted into law by Parliament demonstrates the lack of intellectual rigour and basic regard for material reality, common sense and judicial coherence that had already captured the political class by 2013. If Parliament started the clock on judicial and policy capture to gender ideology ,the courts have proven themselves willing participants.

The Federal Court Justices not only used ideological jargon during the case and in its final ruling (none of which appear in the original SDA) they also ignored a central canon of law; the plain meaning rule where the court is expected to apply the meaning of words as understood by the public at the time the law was written. Instead, Federal Court Justices redefined the word ‘woman’ by judicial fiat:

“Therefore, to the extent that the term ‘woman’ appears in the Sex Discrimination Act or the concept of womanhood is important to its operation, it is not to be understood by reference to any narrow or rigid conception of femaleness.”

The ruling mimics the doublethink of Orwell’s slogans: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. The Australian public must believe, or at least pretend to, that men can be women. They must hold two mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously in mind (sex is binary and immutable) and treat the contradiction (men can now be women) as a profound truth. Orwell described this as:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them…” George Orwell

Neil Foster, Associate Professor of Law, University of Newcastle commented on the ruling like this:

“The judgment adopts the language and worldview of gender ideology wholesale ‘cisgender’, ‘gender-related appearance’, treating ‘trans women’ as a separate class entitled to override sex-based protections. This is not neutral statutory interpretation; it is the entrenchment of a contested ideology through judicial fiat.”

The Houston Bill functions as the foundational scripture of trans ideology – a dense, deliberately slippery and obscurantist legal text that redefines and appropriates common words. It introduces neologisms e.g. gender expression that, once embedded in law, become the legal hook to demand others affirm the gender identity. This is precisely why Grover was fined for direct discrimination - she refused to accept Tickle’s gender expression as evidence that he was a ‘real’ woman.

Traditional rights are structured as freedom from (discrimination, violence etc.) which the Bill flips to ‘freedom to’ (enter women’s sports and spaces). This shifts protections to entitlements.

The Bill employs classic DARVO: Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender. It delegitimises women’s historical fight for single sex protections as ‘regressive’ ‘rights hoarding’, ‘right wing’ and ‘transphobic’ and recasting the men demanding access as ‘the most vulnerable’.

The Bill presents gender ideology as universal liberation (all people) freeing everyone from the limitations of biology and tradition. But in reality, it is a set of demands for a tiny cohort of men that insist language, spaces, sports, safeguards, medicine, law and policy be reorganised to meet their demands.

The Houston Bill imposes Orwellian doublethink into law, policy and institutional life and claims moral legitimacy through a rights and social justice rhetoric. Its ideas do not stand up to serious critique; sex is ‘assigned at birth’, children can be ‘born in the wrong body’ somebody might be ‘neither male nor female’.

Until now, the strategy to impose gender ideology top down via the law has been incredibly effective and the threat of punishment, job losses, social exclusion has silenced many who would otherwise speak out.

But the Federal Court ruling, and the capture of senior members of the judiciary to a reality-denying, post-truth, women’s-rights-destroying ideology has finally woken up the sleeping giant - the public.

While more politicians are finding their courage, the Coalition and One Nation have promised to reinstate biological reality in the Sex Discrimination Act if elected. The other political parties know the gig is up - they can hang on, but not forever.

What began as a niche ideological project of a small number of transsexual men in Houston to gain legal and social acceptance as women that focused on embedding the ideology into law, will also be its undoing. The U.K. is winning women’s rights back one court case at a time. Sall Grover has appealed to the High Court and if the judges value the truth over ideology she will win. Third time lucky.

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On 8th July, Amnesty International UK published a report naming the “anti-rights organisations” it had identified operating in Britain. The list included a rape crisis centre, two gay rights charities, a child safeguarding group and a network of NHS doctors. On the 10th, Amnesty took it down.

Then the letters started. Twenty-two of them at the last count, collected in one place by Sex Matters. Not one of them raises its voice, which is what makes them such a pleasure to read.

Sex Matters open in a spirit of reassurance:

“You may be relieved to learn that since you have taken the Growing threat report down we are not planning to sue Amnesty or the author for defamation.”

They go on to suggest Amnesty sit down with women’s and gay rights groups to discuss their common interest in human rights, and then add this: “We offered such a meeting to Sacha Deshmukh in 2022, but he said he was too busy.”

The Gay Men’s Network open with the assessment that the report is “an unserious smear designed to delegitimise political opponents”, and note that Amnesty is now “creating lists of dissident gays and lesbians in a fashion reminiscent of the more oppressive regimes Amnesty might once have railed against.” On the accusation of homophobia: “We frequently work with lesbian groups and the implication we are homophobic is, frankly, just bizarre.” And on the report’s removal: “We note Amnesty International wisely removed this report from its websites on 10th July.” Note the “wisely”.

Their Welsh colleagues at LGB Alliance Cymru skipped the subtlety. The report, they write, is “a deeply silly and malicious piece of low politics designed to ‘evidence launder’ a list of undesirable gay and lesbian political actors.”

Thoughtful Therapists, accused of supporting conversion practices in a report that never defines them, reached for Lewis Carroll: “As in the case of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, ‘Sentence first - verdict afterwards.’”

Kate Coleman’s letter opens with a detail Amnesty’s researchers somehow missed: “Notwithstanding that the organisation I set up, Keep Prisons Single Sex, shut down in 2024, I am minded to write to you”. The growing threat Amnesty identified includes a group that hasn’t existed for two years.

Third Sector SEEN had to respond to the report’s claim that the anti-rights movement enjoys “substantial financial resources and funding networks”. Their reply: “Third Sector SEEN has no funding” and is run entirely by volunteers.

Then there’s LGB Alliance. Amnesty, remember, intervened on the losing side of the Supreme Court case that For Women Scotland won last year:

“Having lost the argument at the UK Supreme Court, Amnesty has now taken the extraordinary step of branding LGB Alliance (along with For Women Scotland and numerous other organisations) part of an ‘anti-rights’ movement. It somehow neglected to add the Supreme Court.”

They sign off with “Otherwise we will consider next steps”, a sentence every institution in Britain knows how to translate.

Underneath the politeness, the letters keep circling the same, sad thought. For Women Scotland, fresh from a court win protecting women in Scottish prisons: “The old Amnesty would have taken that case rather than attack the women who brought it.” Thoughtful Therapists: “A former version of Amnesty would have been strongly committed to following evidence and the rule of law.” The Gay Men’s Network: “Having once protected dissenters in politics, we take the view Amnesty is now in the business of harassing and defaming gay men and lesbians who express political views it does not like.” These are people who used to be members. Some of them probably still have the candle badge in a drawer.

Amnesty’s response is written in the purest passive voice. It “regrets that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes”. Nobody wrote it, you understand. It was uploaded.

And then, the closer. Beira’s Place, the women-only sexual violence support service JK Rowling founded and funds in Edinburgh, skipped the letters page and went straight to lawyers. The report, they write, “erroneously and maliciously categorises our client as an ‘anti-rights organisation’”. Access to a single-sex service is “a basic right” for women who’ve experienced sexual violence. And then:

“It is therefore beyond comprehension that a supposed human rights organisation would genuinely consider that the work done by Beira’s Place could be classed as ‘anti-rights’.”

The demands are not gentle: permanent withdrawal, an apology on Amnesty’s homepage, an external review into how the “egregious falsehood” got published, and an instruction to preserve all relevant documents. Lawyers only tell you to keep your emails for one reason.

Rowling posted the letter herself: “Another letter to add to Amnesty UK’s overflowing mail box, this one from women-only rape support service, Beira’s Place.” She’s also offered to pay the legal costs of any women’s organisation that fancies taking Amnesty to court.

For years, Amnesty championed the idea that letter-writing gets results. Sadly, for them, the lesson was learned too well.

Sources: the full set of letters, collected by Sex Matters. Beira’s Place letter coverage via LBC and HotAir.

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Lynne Pinches reached the final of the Women’s Champion of Champions in 2023, shook her opponent’s hand, packed her cue away and walked off without taking a single shot. The room stood and cheered her out. Her opponent, a man called ‘Harriet’ Haynes, collected the trophy by default, as he and his supporters shouted ‘freebie’ in triumph.

She had earned that final. Thirty years in the game, hours of practice, and only the fourth final she had ever made. She told the Telegraph that walking away was “the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do in the game in my life”. The night before, she had been up into the small hours, crying, trying to decide whether what she was about to give up would change anything in a game that had just turned against her.

Haynes is not some marginal entrant who fluked his way into a draw. He finished 2024 as the top-ranked player in the women’s series, and he had topped it before that. The women were not inventing a hypothetical to be difficult. They had watched it happen to them, frame by frame, prize by prize, for years.

And then there’s the line the sport always reaches for, that pool is a game of skill rather than strength, so what could a man’s body possibly bring to it. It’s nonsense, and anyone who has held a cue knows it’s nonsense. The break rewards raw power, and men break harder. The bridge rewards reach and hand span, and men have bigger hands and longer arms, so a shot a smaller player has to reach for with a rest is a shot a man takes stretched flat across the cloth with full control. Lynne has said it plainly. She watches the men clear up, potting everything in a single visit to the table, and take on shots down the rails, tight against the cushion where there's no room for error, in a way the women in her category simply don't.

Haynes produced an MIT physicist to argue that a harder break doesn’t decide matches at the top level. His testimony might have been more convincing had it not been for the fact that, in April 2025, at an Ultimate Pool women’s event in Wigan, both finalists were men. Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith had each knocked out four female players to get there, and Haynes beat Smith 8-6 for a women’s title. Inside the hall, women held up signs reading “Save women’s sport” and chanted that they stood with Lynne Pinches.

I’m writing this piece because I just saw MJ Murphy’s enraged and enraging video on the affair. When I knew Lynne in Norwich, the thing that haunted me was her astonishment at what was happening. Like me, she had assumed there had to be someone, somewhere, who would say this was madness and put a stop to it. Two men played each other in a women’s final. What makes MJ’s video useful is that she reacts to Lynne’s story with the fresh anger you have before you learn—as Lynne and I did— that there are no adults in the room, that people are cowards and collaborators, and women’s rights lasted only as long as they did because men didn’t yet know they could simply claim them as their own.

Lynne and a group of other women had already decided not to take it quietly. They went after the governing bodies in law, on the grounds that women were being denied fair competition, and they won the principle. After the Supreme Court confirmed last year that “woman” in equality law means what everyone outside a gender studies seminar already knew it meant, the pressure told. Ultimate Pool changed its rules to protect women-only competition.

The women were right, the law agreed, the category was theirs again.

A happy ending, then. Except Ultimate Pool, and the ‘trans community had to have their revenge.

After Lynne spoke up, the abuse arrived. She was told to kill herself. She was called a bigot, a transphobe, a Nazi. Police advised her to wear a bodycam for her own safety after she was attacked at a Let Women Speak event in Norwich, where a bottle of water was thrown at her back. So she wore one. At the Wigan event in April, Haynes's partner complained about it, and security asked her to take it off.

She did. They threw her out anyway.

In June, Ultimate Pool sent her a letter. She had been ejected, they said, for filming without their permission. The ban would be made permanent if she did it again, or if she said anything derogatory about them, though they would generously reconsider if she accepted that she had been at fault. She wouldn’t, because she hadn’t. So the ban stands. She is banned from playing. She is also banned from spectating, which means she now stands outside the venue while her own son competes inside.

The men reach the finals and lift the trophies. The woman who said out loud that this was wrong, and was then proved right by the highest court in the land, has to wait in the car park while her boy plays the game her family has played for three decades.

In March she lodged a claim against Ultimate Pool at the London Central County Court, with her solicitor Peter Daly, for discrimination on the grounds of belief and for victimisation. You can contribute to her legal fund here. She’s asking for a category that means what it says, and for the right to watch her son without being escorted off the premises.

Ultimate Pool watched the cheating happen and then went after the woman who refused to play along with it. They set out to punish her for defending herself against the cheating, abusive men who had walked into her sport and helped themselves to it. An institution looked at a woman protecting her own game, and decided she was the one who had to go.

I’m backing Lynne because every time they make an example of one woman, they’re talking to every other woman who was thinking about speaking up. “Stay quiet, or this happens to you”. The only answer to that is to make sure it costs them, every single time, to leave the woman who told the truth standing out in the cold.

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The same thing happens to nearly every woman in this book. She is young, she is a tomboy, she finds her way to other lesbians, and then one by one the women she loves announce they are men. Elisabeth from Sweden puts it best, and it’s worth quoting her at length because it sets the tone for everything that follows.

“Most of the women I’ve had romantic relationships with, now identify as men. It felt like an epidemic, as if some kind of virus was spreading through the community. Maybe I was the carrier, immune for some reason, but still infecting the women I slept with one by one, causing them to renounce womanhood.”

I have been receiving letters like this for years, even as the very earliest of my friends and colleagues were condemning me as a bigot. The first I remember was from a young lesbian who had a trans-identified male friend, a ‘transwoman’ in activist language, a transvestite in neutral speech. She thought they were friends, and for a while they were. Then one night, in a bar, he asked if she’d like a relationship with him. As gently as she could, she said no. He slapped her across the face and walked out. That told me everything about what was coming. The kindness runs one way. The instant lesbians say no, the ‘women’ demanding access to them remember they possess a right hook. I have been handed this story, in one form or another, hundreds of times. And here again, now, are nineteen more.

They come from a dozen countries, and most give only a first name. Saying this from inside the gay movement still costs enough to keep the surnames off the page. Tonje Gjevjon, a Norwegian artist who was investigated by her own police force for saying men are men, gathered them through the network around Women’s Declaration International, LGB Alliance and the Lesbian Not Criminal roadshow. The book is funded by Fritt Ord, the Norwegian free-expression foundation. The testimonies follow a loose template. Bullied at school. A few good years on the scene. The arrival of the word “queer”. The friends who transition. The peaking. The cost.

These women did not coordinate. They are in Norway and Mexico and rural New South Wales, describing the same decade from inside their own lives. By the time Aja in the UK, a name familiar to my UK readers, runs into the same young lesbian couple twice in one summer, both of them now bearded and calling themselves gay men, you have stopped treating any single story as anecdote. Nineteen similar stories from around the world make for a slim book, but the weight is in the experience they share of the worst crisis for gay people since AIDS.

Just like the AIDS virus, trans ideology turns the host against itself. Elisabeth describes waiting in the hospital for her girlfriend Mikaela to come out of surgery. “Two breasts gone, two healthy body parts.” Four words recur, here and again near the end of her piece: “She was never sick.” The first time, she finishes the thought. “Society was, demanding this bloody, grotesque sacrifice to adhere to norms that she never even believed in in the first place.” She marks, too, how the word “woman” was quietly mutilated while its opposite went untouched. “It’s woman with an asterisk now. Woman footnoted. Woman with exceptions. No one felt the need to alter the word man.”

Belmore, an American veterinary nurse born with a heart defect and a body she calls a “disabled vessel”, produces the most unexpected argument in the book. She watches healthy young women take testosterone and remove healthy organs while she needs a pacemaker to stay alive, and she reaches for her training. Zoochosis, she explains, is what happens to intelligent caged animals whose physical needs are met but whose minds are starved. They self-harm, often targeting their own genitals. A vet’s job is to find the stressor and ease the pain. “Yet, when a teenage girl shows up to a human clinic covered in self-harm scars because she wishes she could live a fictional life as a boy, why is it that we take up a scalpel and start cutting her? Why do we treat animals with more dignity than our mothers, sisters, and daughters? Why?”

Tania, from London, supplies the only laugh, and it curdles fast. She develops a crush on a feminist man who keeps insisting men aren’t biologically stronger, until he loses patience, yanks up his shirt and shrieks, “Look at my nipple!... Look how dodgy my nipple is!” The man is an eighteen-year-old lesbian with a double mastectomy. Two things collapse at once. The first man Tania thought she wanted is a young woman her own age with her breasts cut off, and the future being sold to lesbians like her is suddenly the body of someone she desired. She attempted suicide that night and couldn’t say why for six years.

Coercion runs through nearly every account. The “cotton ceiling”, the long-running demand that a lesbian who won’t sleep with a trans-identified male has something to examine in herself. Several of the women call it what it is, conversion therapy in a nicer jumper. It runs through the dating apps too, which quietly switch a woman’s “lesbian, women only” settings back and let the men in. I once took out a profile on the lesbian app Her Social to show that men really were doing this, in numbers, in earnest. People did what they always do and looked at my finger instead of what I was pointing at. The mechanism hasn’t changed since. Men go on these apps calling themselves lesbians, and when a lesbian complains, Her Social removes the lesbian. Grindr does the same to gay men who object to trans-identified women turning up in their results. The complaint is the offence, never the imposture. It is corporate homophobia, and gay men are only starting to feel now what lesbians have lived with from the beginning.

There are quieter through-lines. Magdalen Berns, whose YouTube videos turn up as the turning point in account after account, years after her death, doing more for these women than any institution that claimed to speak for them. And the spaces, the actual bars and clubs and magazines, which close and do not reopen. Gjevjon’s own preface tracks the loss precisely. The society that “once supported me, as a young lesbian, when I told men claiming to be lesbians to fuck off, now tells young lesbians to be inclusive, kind, and to ‘educate themselves’.”

This is not the first book of its kind, because the thing it records keeps happening. In 2018, I came across a young lesbian, Kitty Robinson, running a Facebook group full of women recovering from sexual abuse by trans-identified partners and friends. I couldn’t find a single journalist who would touch it. She went on to collect those accounts in You Told Me You Were Different, forty-three women describing the abuse and then the gaslighting that came when they tried to name it. This new book carries that work forward, and there will be more behind it.

A Generation X lesbian in Australia once gave me the whole arc in a sentence. “I used to get beaten up by queer bashers. Now I get threatened by people calling themselves queer.” Elizabeth, whose long, scrupulous account is its spine, understood the stakes exactly. Writing of the women who fought this without thanks, she says: “When it is over, history writers may pretend we were never there. Let them try. The record will remain, and the omission will be noted.” Nineteen women, refusing to be edited out of their own history, and reminding us that lesbians saw it first.

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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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