“Terrible things are happening to women and girls across my country… and the media doesn’t care. It’s only interested in the trans issue.”
Vaishnavi Sundar, an Indian feminist filmmaker, has long been furious at the way women and girls are …
The new front in the war against HIV
When the head of the UK’s largest and longest-running HIV charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, told this year’s Pride London parade that Britain could soon be the first country in the world to eradicate HIV, the cheer that went up …
The trouble with conversion therapy
Group belonging is important for human beings. We are tribal mammals and evolution has left some of us as terrified of social exclusion as we are of physical death. But as always, you can have too much of a good …
Why did Jacqueline Rose erase women?
What is a woman? Hoping he might be able to answer this vexatious question, the New Statesman turned to Richard Dawkins. In the resulting piece, the biologist expresses sympathy with those with gender dysphoria, but is unequivocal that a woman …
Has Gids learned from its failure?
Tomorrow, it will be a year since the closure of the controversial Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust was announced. Rated inadequate by the Care Quality Commission and overwhelmed by an exponential rise …
Lesbian mothers should be on birth certificates
If you’re a politician, the presence of a global LGBT+ activist movement offers large amounts of political bang for your buck, pound or euro — whether that’s by waving trans flags enthusiastically, or by banning books about gay dads. Last …
Doctors have failed detransitioners
Every medical student should acquaint themselves with the discomfiting history of epilepsy surgery. Regardless of their eventual speciality, they will become better clinicians for it. As a cautionary tale of what happens when we lose sight of primum non nocere …
The perversion of lesbian envy
Of all the footnotes to Kathleen Stock’s recent trip to Oxford, perhaps the most unedifying was the sight of me and my friends — ranging in age from 30 to 70 — exclaiming “Phwoar!” in private chat groups. But as …
I was sacked for writing about trans censorship
For a quarter of a century, on and off, Melbourne’s “quality” daily newspaper The Age not only published my words — it was my intellectual home.
I had joined the paper’s staff around the turn of the century as a …
The plot to redefine conversion therapy
The majority-Muslim city of Yogyakarta, on the humid southern coast of Java, is rarely associated with progressive politics. While being gay is not illegal there, it is certainly not tolerated: the Indonesian island has a history of shunting homosexual men …
The gender wars are not a gift to the Right
As a critic of transactivism, one thing you hear a lot is how you are “propping up” the Right — or even the far-Right. You may think that all you are doing is pointing out some fairly obvious downsides to …
‘I will never call my rapist father a woman’
“I have no respect for those criminal sex offenders who want to make life easier for themselves,” says Ceri-Lee Galvin. “My father wasn’t dysphoric about his male genitals when he was abusing me.”
Ceri-Lee is a bright and confident 24-year-old …
Why is my gender research being cancelled?
Since my academic paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria was published last month, it has been downloaded more than 38,000 times and is ranked in the top percentile of similar articles in terms of online attention. One might think that …
Why should lesbians sleep with men?
If you are a late millennial or early Gen Z-er, life is probably quite hard right now. Chances are that you can’t afford to buy your own home, or even go out socialising that much. Perhaps you can’t avoid feeling …
Is trans the new anorexia?
When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular …