LINKS TO LATEST NEWS STORIES, FEATURES, BLOGS OR VIDEOS

RECOMMENDED: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy Carol Dansereau

• Trans people are not an oppressed minority Jo Bartosch in Spiked 03.07.22
• Constitutional row looms as Suella Braverman targets Scottish gender bill The Times 04.07.22
• Labour accused of ‘silencing’ women in row over sex-based rights group Guardian 03.07.22
• Scotland: Primary pupils are being bullied and called transphobic for using wrong pronouns The Times 03.07.22
• Police investigating JK Rowling death threat after trans activist urged Twitter users to send bomb to author’s home Mail 03.07.22
• Single-sex lavatories to be mandatory in all new public buildings The Telegraph 01.07.22
• Spaces of our own The Critic 02.07.22
• Jordan Peterson: ‘Gay kids are being convinced they’re transsexual. That’s not so good for gay people, is it?’ The Telegraph 01.07.22
• How Aussie birth certificates could soon have NO gender – amid proposals to let people switch from man to woman every 12 months Mail 01.07.22
• Scout Association faces backlash over new ‘trans fun’ badge for members as young as four years old which have been slammed as ‘inappropriate’ Mail 01.07.22
• The sinister side of Pride The Spectator 01.07.22
• Oxford University told to reveal Stonewall’s LGBT diversity scores The Times 01.07.22
• Detransitioners should sue the NHS The Critic 30.06.22
• ‘Farts’ – How women who question transgender ideology are described in Scottish Government training The Telegraph 30.06.22
• Schools can resist the trans wars UnHerd 30.06.22
• Tavistock clinic: Gender change data to be scrutinised The Times 30.06.22
• Ministers need to enforce fairness for females in sport – now The Guardian 29.06.22
• People changing gender under new Scottish trans laws risk having status ignored in England The Times 29.06.22
• Why TERFs need to leave the left Julie Burchill in Spiked online 29.06.22
• Halifax is slammed for introducing pronouns to staff name badges but tells customers to close their accounts if they don’t like it Mail 29.06.22
• Legal fears could block moves to prioritise women over trans athletes The Guardian 28.06.22
• Protesters in anti-Sturgeon T-shirts ejected from Holyrood gender law reform debate The Times 29.06.22
• Now the NHS quietly removes the word ‘women’ from its MENOPAUSE page Mail 28.06.22
• Trying to erase the biological definition of sex isn’t just misguided – it’s dangerous The Guardian 28.06.22
• Woman suing rape charity over transgender row BBC 27.06.22
• Why I’m suing the council that tried to bully me into silence Julie Bindel in The Mail 27.06.22
• Is trans surgery just state-sanctioned mutilation? Brendan O’Neill 25.06.22

 

Articles about Allison Bailey’s lawsuit have been moved to a new page here.

Peak Trans four years on

“At the end of 2021, the debate on sex and gender and the conflict with women’s rights feels very different, at least in the UK, from the way it felt at the end of 2019. There have been a series of legal wins and cultural shifts. People are finding a voice and wrenching the discussion back to reality.”

The above paragraph conveys exactly what I wanted to say in this update, and I am grateful to the legend who is Maya Forstater of Sex Matters for articulating it so well in the introductory paragraph of an article comprehensively detailing how much has been achieved in the UK while alerting us to the battle still to be won on so-called ‘conversion therapy’.

While I’ve continued to try to keep this website updated with the latest news stories and features, regular visitors will probably be aware that I have, since the start of lockdown in 2020, devoted some time to making youtube videos and I am blown away by the appreciative responses to them. Sometimes people express surprise that I don’t have more subscribers but it’s hard to promote videos when banned from social media platforms, so I am thankful to those who share them.

I currently post my latest videos at the top of the right-hand menu but the ones I want to highlight most at this time are a series of four in which I narrate what happened when, in the light of the unjust – and ultimately quashed – conviction of Kate Scottow, I decided to test our criminal justice system and report a trans activist bully to Merseyside police. The contrast between the response of Merseyside police to a woman reporting a relentless trans-identifying bully and how police around the UK have responded to gender activists reporting women for far lesser offences, is stark indeed and campaigner Harry Miller’s recent triumph over the College of Policing seems all the more crucial because of it.

Looking back at what I wrote as an introduction to this website when I launched it at the end of 2017, I am surprised to find that I can still stand by most of it. I had the feeling that my views had shifted a lot more than perhaps they have. In fact, there are only two things that I think completely differently about now, both of which I had already articulated in my update two years ago, when I said that, “if anyone I knew personally today told me they were considering ‘transition’, I would try to talk them out of it”. The second thing is more complicated. Two years ago I said I’d stopped being careful about language for fear of offending people. Over the past year I have become careful about language again but for a different reason. Whereas I was never going to be browbeaten into using silly ideological terms like ‘cis’ and ‘sex assigned at birth’ and I have long since stopped using ‘transwoman’ and ‘transman’, I have now abandoned the use of the term ‘transgender/trans’ – as in ‘trans people’ – altogether.

‘Transgender’ is a label and those who choose to apply it to themselves do so for various reasons. This is why, if it is absolutely necessary to specify that I am talking about people who claim to be transgender, I will only use ‘trans-identifying’. Otherwise I will just call them what they are: men and women. The invention of a ‘trans umbrella’ has robbed the term ‘transgender’ of any useful meaning and using terms like ‘trans people’ give credence to what I have come to see as a dangerous falsehood.

Maria MacLachlan 1st January 2022

Video: Assault on Maria MacLachlan at Speakers’ Corner and the trans activist response

 

Peak Trans two years on

When I started this site two years ago, I never imagined that the hate campaign against me, which had started on the day I was physically attacked by three violent trans activists in September 2017, would continue to this day.

This is why I decided to make the video above. It includes all the footage taken at Speakers’ Corner, which gives the lie to the alternative narrative spread by trans activist bullies, many of whose comments appear in the film. It will remain on the front of this website permanently.

I blogged some of the responses: Trans activist bullies who “didn’t watch” my video about them hated it

An abridged version, which leaves out the trans activists’ input and focuses on what happened and the testimony of the defence witnesses Ananya Jaidev, Kat Higgins, Laurel Uziell and Devawn Wilkinson can be seen here. 

I also had no idea how busy this site would keep me. The several hundred links to news stories, articles and videos that I started with has now grown to several thousand, with new links being added on most days. I am delighted at how popular this site has proven to be and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the supportive messages, the links to articles for inclusion and the donations, which help so much to keep it running.

What I wrote on the day I launched this site at the end of 2017 was true at the time of writing but, after two years immersed in the ‘gender wars’, my thinking on some things has evolved and I wouldn’t write that same introduction were I launching this site today.

One thing that has changed is that if anyone I knew personally today told me they were considering ‘transition’, I would try to talk them out of it. The reasons are many but suffice it to say that, having learned so much from so many trans people, detransitioned people and from some whose lives have been profoundly impacted by transgender ideology, I believe that too many are making the decision to transition too lightly and on too little information and sometimes the effect on their lives and on those of their loved ones has been catastrophic.

Another thing is that I no longer care about offending people. Transgender ideology is – as evidenced by a large number of items linked to from this site – oppressive and misogynistic and those who promote it are intolerant, short on reason and often hateful. For this reason, I am far less careful about language and am more inclined to use terms like ‘trans-identifying males’, which I used to avoid for fear of offending…well, trans-identifying males.

I would like to reiterate that I support the right of adults to ultimately make their own decision on how they present themselves and on whether or not to medically alter their appearance. I also strongly believe that trans people should have the same human rights as anyone else. However, I know from experience that it doesn’t matter how often I say this, as far as trans activists are concerned, anything short of full submission to trans ideology justifies opprobrium and abuse.

There are many ways in which my thinking has changed in respect of transgenderism and I will continue to update various things I’ve said on this site accordingly but I will leave my original introduction below untouched. It is now archived here: What’s this site about?

Maria MacLachlan 3rd January 2020