This is what I wrote when I started this site in December 2017. Scroll down for updates two years and four years later.

Like all decent people, I care about human suffering. I want to be compassionate, I want to challenge prejudice and fight discrimination against others, especially on grounds that they can’t help. That includes having gender dysphoria or other medical conditions that might lead one to reject the gender roles and expectations associated with their biological sex. People can’t help how they feel and if they are so unhappy with their body and their lives that they feel they have to have surgery and/or take hormones for the rest of their lives, I’m not going to judge them for that. On the contrary, I try to empathise and show love and support to those I know personally who are in that position.

But when such people lack the empathy to understand why a woman who’s been abused by a man doesn’t want to share a room in a women’s shelter or shower communally in a prison with somebody who has a penis, when they express classic sadistic male sexual fantasies to try to belittle and humiliate women, when they resort to bullying and violence to try to intimidate women who disagree with them – as they did with me at Speakers Corner – that’s when I start fighting back and this website I am creating is part of my personal fightback as well as a way of channelling my anger over what happened to me. For those who don’t understand the name of this website, ‘peak trans’ – a term originally coined by a radical feminist named Jane Crafts – is the moment when you realise that much of your sympathy and support for transgenderism has evaporated.

Mine came early in 2017. At that time I had bookmarked under the trans topic maybe twenty articles, comments and videos that had made some kind of impression on me. Now I have collected a few hundred more and they are getting unwieldy, so I decided to put the ones I found most interesting on a website as a resource for others.

On many pages, I have included some of my own thoughts, which reflect where my head is at now and which I will update as my ideas evolve and change or become consolidated.

Where I’m at now is that, in spite of what many transgendered people seem to think about those of us who challenge their ideas, I categorically believe that transgendered people matter as much as everyone else and are entitled to the same human rights. I do not accept that those who “identify” as women are the same as those of us born female and should have free access to all sex-segregated spaces and sports. The same goes for those women who identify as men.

I completely reject the claim that those men who have raped or been violent in any other way towards women and those who joke about, promote or applaud violence against us for any reason are themselves women. That is what it’s all about as far as I am concerned. If it wasn’t for the hatred towards women standing up to trans ideology that I see displayed every day on social media, I wouldn’t see the trans agenda as dangerous and I wouldn’t be devoting any time at all to fighting it.

I have read many blogs and articles by transgender activists and have found the majority to be poorly argued and unpersuasive. I’ve also read several books including Excluded by Julia Serano and Transgendered Voices by Lori B. Gerschick. Let nobody accuse me of not trying to understand.

A major headache I’ve had in writing for this website has been about language and choice of words. I don’t want to offend anyone, except for the violent males who claim to be women and the women who shield them, all of whom I hold in contempt. But I can’t please all the people whose feelings I care about. For this reason, I have decided to do what feels most comfortable to me and mostly use male-born/female-born trans or MtT and FtT (male to trans and female to trans) for those who usually describe themselves as ‘trans women’ and ‘trans men’ respectively. There is a glossary in the menu bar above.

Also, I sometimes refer to those trans people plus allies who are basically Men’s Rights Activists and enemies of women and progress and who behave in a cultish manner as the ‘trans cult’ or ‘trans cultists’, which are terms I have learned from certain trans people I am happy and privileged to count as friends.

There is much more in the pipeline to add to this site and it will continue to be a work in progress for the foreseeable future. But I’ve decided to launch it now as 2017 – which I will always think of as my year of peak trans – comes to a close.

Maria MacLachlan 27th December 2017

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-identifying 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

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.

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