Skin in the game

David Tennant is playing with the lives of other people's children

On a recent episode of The Mess, the normally cheerful Helen Staniland showed a rare flintiness as we discussed David Tennant’s recent attack on Kemi Badenoch. At yet another LGBT+ award ceremony, the actor expressed the nasty and reckless wish for a world in which she “doesn’t exist anymore”, presumably because of her opposition to transing children. His passion for the issue, he told the audience of coked-up misogynists, arose from the fact that he had ‘skin in the game’ because he and his wife have decided that one of their kids is ‘non-binary’. Isn't it curious how these courageous, exceptional children often secure for themselves a family with rich, celebrity parents? How do they keep doing it??

In truth, it’s not their son’s fault. ‘Non-binary’ is claptrap, but a child isn't equipped to question it, especially when their parents, along with society at large, present it as a genuine category. Like a nasty twist on telling kids that Santa Claus squeezes down the chimney each Christmas, parents like The Tennants have convinced their young

children that they are neither male nor female. And as with Santa, they introduce the fantasy at an age when children are at their most credulous and trusting.

The impossibility of Santa, a somewhat grave realisation which usually occurs to every child around the age of ten, forces them to encounter a profound truth: that even those who love you might sometimes deceive you, that they may even have a good reason to do so. But kids raised around zealots learn no such lessons. In the same way that puberty blockers suspend natural development in a chemical bath, gender ideology pickles the intellectual growth of these children of privilege. They may never grow out of believing in this Santa, who arrives at your house only to take everything from you.

Dr. Giancarlo McEvenue, a surgeon who performs elective double mastectomies at McLean Clinic in Mississauga, Ontario poses for a “light-hearted” Christmas photo

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I first saw David Tennant play the lead role in a production of "Black Comedy," the unmatched farce by Peter Shaffer where a blackout leads to evolving chaos as the characters navigate the ‘darkness’ of a fully lit stage. At one point, Tennant slid down a flight of stairs feet-first, his head hitting every step on the way down like a finger running along piano keys. The production ignited in me a fierce love for its ingenuity and economy. It is a perfect farce.

Fast forward twenty-five years or so and I was asked by Sonia Friedman on behalf of the Peter Shaffer estate to write an accompanying piece to ‘Black Comedy’. The play is necessarily short as the energy required from the actors is intense, so productions always need another piece, using the same ensemble, to run alongside it. The Tennant production was partnered with Tom Stoppard's "The Real Inspector Hound" but now, Friedman told me, they wanted a permanent companion for it.

This was a huge moment for me. As Woody Allen once pointed out, comedy writers are generally seated at the children’s table. Yet here I was being given the chance to create something that would run alongside something written by the man behind Eqqus and Amadeus. The joy lasted a week or so before Schaffer's estate said they were withdrawing the offer because of my support for women’s rights, which were under unprecedented attack. They told me “they weren’t taking sides” (they were) but they “didn't want to get involved” (they had).

Last year, I saw Tennant wearing a T-shirt reading “Leave Trans Kids Alone, you freaks” I responded angrily, calling him a groomer. I can think of few things more dangerous than the beloved star of the equally beloved Doctor Who adding to the myth of the ‘trans child’, and insulting the men and women trying to prevent those same kids from permanently harming themselves.

Tennant successfully persuaded my agents at Independent to stop representing me. It was the last trace of any connection I had with the entertainment business. And yet, I too got away lightly, for true believers like him have inflicted far greater harm on others.

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Outside of rarified environments like Soho House and Tennant’s £2.6m house in Chiswick, there is a lot more at stake for those with a trans identity. The brilliant video essayist Exulansic regularly posts content young trans-identified people are sharing online. Every clip underscores the alarming lack of knowledge among this group. In the last few weeks, she has been sharing content by ‘Azlan’, a young transitioned woman who is clearly in extreme distress. Her doctor has recently put her back on testosterone, and the videos she posts online are agonising cries for help from a deeply disturbed person who has been told an evil lie.

Doctor Az Hakeem, one of the whistleblowers who called The Tavistock a ‘transitioning factory’ told a journalist that he noticed in gender clinics an “overrepresentation” of parents transitioning their 2nd child, where the first child had died tragically, and was the opposite sex. This is horrific, but at least it has its roots in something halfway understandable; grief making people do terrible things is the staple of many a horror story. But the sheer scale of this emergency is the true horror. Transitioning children is a monkey’s paw with a thousand fingers. This is what ‘skin in the game’ looks like.

All the women in these photographs are four times more likely than men to have a heart attack. They will likely go into early menopause, which means incontinence, brittle bones, and a greater risk of dementia. They subject themselves to this risk to acquire secondary sex characteristics usually associated with males, like the bearded lady at the carnival in a Ray Bradbury short story. They do this because, from childhood, they have been deceived by adults—adults ranging sometimes from their own parents, to teachers, journalists, YouTube streamers, politicians, theatre kids, anonymous online groomers and even Doctor Who himself. Society collectively convinces them that cosmetic changes will heal their anxiety, or their autism, or the lingering trauma and self-hatred that often follows abuse; the cruelty of the lie is a counterweight to the vulnerability of its targets.

My sympathy even for grieving parents is limited when transitioning children is concerned, and there is no trace of it left for ex-Mermaids CEO Susie Green. In her extraordinary Ted Talk, Green admitted that she and her husband transitioned their son because they were uncomfortable with him playing with girls’ toys. This was when Jack was four, (roughly the same age kids *begin* grasping the concept of Santa). From then on, Green kept a tight schedule. She put her son on puberty blockers at the age of eleven and had his penis removed in Thailand on the day of his sixteenth birthday (the very day of it; they were in the air when he was still fifteen). The Ted Talk was up for years before it disappeared from the Internet without explanation. Perhaps someone finally realised that she was describing an acceptable form of gay conversion therapy, one found at the end of a scalpel

In Thailand, she had requested a vaginoplasty for her son, but this proved impossible thanks to the puberty blockers she had been feeding him since his eleventh year, These prevented the normal development of his penis, which is inverted to create a neovagina in conventional vaginoplasty. Instead, in what has become common practice for children unlucky enough to have been born to parents like the Greens, the surgical team used a segment of his colon instead.

Here is another video we have been sharing for years. Susie Green chuckling about the procedure in a scene from a documentary that’s suddenly very hard to see.

“The surgeons around the world do something called penile inversion, where they basically use skin from the penis to create the vagina. And she hadn't developed through full puberty. So to not put too fine a point on it. There wasn't much there to work with. (laughs) Sorry, Jackie. She’ll hate that.”

Like so many other adults in this debate, Susie Green placed the bet, but her child paid the cost.

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And then there are the children of privilege, whose kids tend to get off the trans train with their bodies and sanity intact. Celebrities can never articulate why their children belong to a sacred class, and they assume we will accept the claim on faith alone. The concept of ‘nepo babies’ has been circulating for a few years now, but at least the kids who end up in the same profession as their famous parents are creating something. The non-binary child is special from the get-go, special by birth. It often feels like a new aristocracy; celebrities consider themselves as so remarkable, so unique, that they presume these qualities persist in their children.

Or maybe they do believe it. Maybe they do believe that some people are neither male nor female. But to apply the principle of Occam’s Razor, have you ever thought, Mister Tennant, that your child might just be a bit quiet? Are quiet people in a family of showbiz show-offs going to receive the punishment of a 'non-binary' tag forevermore? Whatever the case, whatever the reason you put an evil worm in a child’s brain, the luxury of your lifestyle means he will likely escape this movement in one piece. I doubt even you will follow your son into an operating room to practice Susie Green’s approach to parenting.

Even more so than ‘trans’, the term ‘non-binary’ is meaningless, its only cost the breath it takes to say the words '“I am non-binary”. And that’s the appeal for celebrities: its minimal investment. A price is being paid, but not by them, never by them. Families are broken up, bodies are maimed, minds are destroyed. But for the privileged, a non-binary identity can be discarded as easily as last season’s Hermés bag, or Jackie Green’s genitals, or Azlan’s peace of mind. David Tennant might want to reflect on this before he steps in front of another microphone.

(Thanks to Helen Staniland for inspiring this piece and @utotalbellend for the graphic at the top).