LINKS TO LATEST NEWS STORIES, FEATURES, BLOGS OR VIDEOS

• Wokery beyond parody because university slaps a TRIGGER warning on George Orwell’s 1984 as it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’ Mail 22.01.22
• HSBC adds pronouns to staff name badges The Telegraph 23.01.22
• Scotland: Ministers rapped over census and women’s rights Times 23.01.22
• Now even the word ‘maternity’ is facing a ban at Britain’s ‘wokest’ university after diversity chiefs said the term was now ‘problematic’ and ‘exclusionary’ Mail 23.01.22
• Ireland: Lesbian Conference Invites Male As Keynote Speaker Redux 23.01.22
• We need to talk about conversion therapy before it is barred, say MPs Telegraph 22.01.22
• Criminalising parental love Brendan O’Neill 22.01.22
• New York Gov. Proposes Gender “Inclusive” Prison Policies Redux 22.01.22
• Scotland: Christians ‘can’t express their gender reform views’ The Times 22.01.22
• Sex, trans rights and the Scottish census Spectator 21.01.22
• Scotland: Police struggle to cope as new hate crime law leads to surge in reports The Times 21.01.22
• Get tough on trans activist complaints, peers tell watchdog The Times 21.01.22
• Lords standards commissioner accused of ‘sinister’ attempt to silence peers who voiced trans prisoner concerns The Telegraph 20.01.22
• Scotland: Campaigners challenge right to self-identify The Times 20.01.22
• Are sex offenders exploiting trans-rights policies behind bars? James Kirkup in The Spectator 19.01.22
• Scots feel shut out of gender debate, says Kate Forbes The Times 18.01.22
• Fact not fiction – a  response to the GEO Maya Forstater in The Critic 17.01.22
• Olympics facing new row over trans-athletes as top medical experts warn guidelines are unfair on female athletes and undermine integrity of sport Mail 12.01.22
• Suicide by Clinic-Referred Transgender Adolescents in the United Kingdom Michael Biggs 18.01.22
• Inside the Tory trans civil war Jo Bartosch in UnHerd 18.01.22

 

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’.

Take action: the Sex Matters website advises how we can respond to the government consultation by 4th February 2022.

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