We’re making great progress

So why am I feeling so angry?

In the years that I’ve been out as someone on this side of the sex/gender row, I’ve had many conversations with people who’ve come into it via difficult routes – an incautious tweet; a workplace row; a family falling-out. Typically, these people are shell shocked. Even those who had already been watching quietly for some time and understood the viciousness find the impact when it’s happening to them much worse than they had ever imagined. The ones who keep their head above water and start working to counter it will typically tell me about their fury and desire for revenge. 

And always, I’ve said that they should accept something right now: there will be no justice. The people who get whatever praise is going when it’s all over will not be the ones who did the most or lost the most. Even more tragically, the people who did the greatest harm are unlikely ever to be held to account.

Anger is a luxury we can’t afford, I’ve said. The “both sides” narrative is so firmly embedded that a single intemperate word from a sensible, professional woman who is risking everything to defend women’s rights and child safeguarding is regarded as justifying the death threats, the protests outside venues and the mobbing campaigns aimed at destroying careers. 

And anyway, I add, anger is futile. It doesn’t convince people of the righteousness of your cause or convince them to join you. When I teach writing I talk about how to persuade people, whether as a journalist writing an editorial urging a government to take a particular course of action, as a marketer seeking to get people to buy your product or as a business professional presenting your preferred course of action to a company board. 

Typically, people who want to convince others of something reach for emotive language and superlatives. But words are cheap: it is easy to say that a person is an amazing hire or an opportunity is unmissable, especially when you’re not the one who has to work with the person or pay if the opportunity doesn’t work out. And words have been further cheapened by marketers. Press releases are filled with words like great, best, leader, innovative and unique.

No, the way to persuade is a calm, authoritative tone and evident command of the facts. This is particularly the case when your opponents are deploying the opposite. I’m often struck by the emotional incontinence of the people who attend trans-rights protests. Perhaps the cause attracts the mentally unwell or perhaps these adults are behaving like toddlers to display their victim status and hence their moral righteousness. Some people seem to find it entertaining to watch; when I see these people making what in Ireland is called “a show of themselves” I feel vicarious shame. 

And so I’ve been surprised by my emotions in the past two weeks – ever since, in fact, I read an embargoed copy of the Cass Report on April 9th. The report was a breakthrough, moving the debate on paediatric gender interventions a long way in the right direction. It was also sweet vindication for anyone who, like me, has been accused of hating trans-identifying kids and wanting them dead for saying the sorts of things Dr Cass is now being widely praised for saying. 

So why have I felt so angry?

In part it’s that I finally have the luxury. It’s like the way you don’t feel the pain of an injury when you’re still in the middle of an emergency, or the way teachers don’t get ill during term-time but come down with flu as soon as the holidays begin. I’ve been keeping going for years now day to day, focusing on the next urgent task. A big win lets me take stock and to feel all the big emotions: elation for what’s been achieved, sorrow for what’s been lost – and rage at the sheer waste of it all. 

I’m feeling furious with lots of different sorts of people. In increasing order of fairness, let’s call them the angels, the cowards, the sinners and the reverse ferreters.

So who are the angels? Well, obviously Dr Cass is one. Her report is great; she’s a heroine for sticking with it despite the intransigence of the adult gender services who refused to cooperate and the insults and threats she’s experienced. And yet I’m angry with her. It’s not so much the occasional captured language in her report, which stands out like a sore thumb among the mostly sensible and evidence-based content. (“Trans female” for men who identify as women? Seriously?)

No, what’s really irritating me is her introductory throat-clearing about the “toxicity” of the debate and how there’s fault on “both sides”. There’s a spectrum that runs from “there’s a lot of shouting from two opposed groups so sensible people must be somewhere in the middle, and I’m sensible so I’m in the middle” to “One side is broadly sane and the other absolutely lunatic; but I want sensible people to hear me and the loons not to be too awful to me, so I can’t come down too firmly on either side”. I don’t know where Dr Cass is on this spectrum, but all the “reasonable people” who start to think about this topic come in somewhere between those two positions.

Once they publicly say where they stand, however, they invariably come under attack from the lunatics – and that makes them realise that there really aren’t two broadly equivalent sides. One is genuinely deranged, and it’s not the one I’m on. And that experience tends to be very illuminating. Wherever Dr Cass was when her report came out, I bet she has shifted during the two weeks since, during which one side has praised her diligence and sought to engage with policymakers even if it has minor quibbles, while the other waves banners saying “Cass is social murder”, lies about her methodology, claims she’s far right and makes threats sufficiently credible that the police have told her not to travel by public transport.

But by saying “both sides” and “toxic debate” in her report, she has already drawn a moral equivalence between people like me, who want trans-identifying children to get decent care, and the people who tweet about cutting my face up and call me an antisemite. The “both sides” brigade may not realise that’s what they’re doing, but it is. And so I’m angry with them. I suppose I shouldn’t really be. They’ll learn: everyone does. And the lesson isn’t pleasant.

Next the cowards. I’m reluctant to single out individuals because someone may have a backstory I don’t know – a trans-identifying child, for example. But that cannot be the case for everyone whose job or expertise means they really should have said something. The popular-science brigade, who used to be so vocal about the silliness of homeopathy and the dangers of chiropractic. The sceptics and atheists, who have said nothing at all about the rise of a godless neo-religion. The people who are well paid to work for a regulator or have statutory child safeguarding duties. The civil servants who take public money and keep their heads down. The employees of charities that are supposed to represent women’s interests, or children’s, or gay people’s, who watch as their organisations use tax-free donations to work against those group’s interests. There are so many of them.

And sometimes I hear from them. They tell me that if they said anything, they would lose their job. But if it’s central to their job, that’s simply not good enough. If you’re too afraid to say something on this you have no right to take money for being a science educator or investigative journalist or child safeguarding expert: you’re a fraud. Go sell carpets or record audiobooks or whatever instead.

Now the sinners. Someone I know who has run effective political campaigns told me recently that the stories that cut through best with public opinions are those of “repentant villains”: people who have done great harm, only later to realise it and say so publicly. (When I met Jamie Reed, a whistle-blower who used to work in an American paediatric gender clinic, I told her this and she accepted the label.)

But these people are rare – and generally only appear once a scandal has run its course and people have been punished. Some of those found guilty, whether by the justice system or the court of public opinion, seek to atone by campaigning against future scandals. The gender scandal hasn’t reached that point yet, so most of those involved have avoided any external reckoning. Even if their conscience pricks them they tend to squash down any doubt they feel, in the hope of avoiding the reckoning indefinitely. 

What we’re are starting to see, however, is people who said rather than did the wrong thing. After the Cass Report Wes Streeting, an influential Labour politician who is expected to hold the health brief if and when Labour win the next election, said he was wrong for reciting the trans creed (“trans women are women”) and had significantly shifted his opinion. On April 24th the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, whose department has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards semi-sensible guidance for schools on trans issues, said that she too had failed to understand the issues. 

It’s unbelievably unhelpful to feel angry with such people. There is no path to where we want to be that doesn’t involve them changing their mind; if those who do so first get shouted at it makes it less likely more will follow. And yet it’s so difficult not to. How can they have been so slow? Do they not know that while they dawdled, women were losing their rights and children were being harmed? Presumably not – but they should have known.

And finally there are the reverse ferreters. This lovely bit of British journalese was coined by Kelvin Mackenzie when he was editor of the Sun, a daily tabloid. When he wanted his minions to go after a public figure he would tell them to “stick a ferret up their trousers” – a reference to the (unsurprisingly) defunct “sport” of ferret-legging – men competing to see who could cope longest with a ferret inside their trousers securely sealed at the belt and ankles. If Mackenzie later felt that the public mood concerning one of his victims had shifted, he would order them to “reverse ferret” – seamlessly start praising them without any reference to past vilification. 

The essence of a reverse ferret is the same as with Orwell’s “we have always been at war with Eastasia”: you don’t just change direction, you act oblivious to the fact that you ever faced the other way. The cardinal current example is Ruth Hunt. I’ve heard from multiple sources that when she was seeking to become chief executive of Stonewall in 2014, she canvassed support among Stonewall supporters, in particular lesbians. She promised several that she would not alter Stonewall’s remit to extend it from gay rights to trans issues – only then, as soon as she was installed, to do so without consultation with anyone except trans groups. 

In my professional and friendship groups she is therefore spoken of with disdain. That intensified to vitriol after an interview she gave to the Times that was published on April 13th. In it she executes a reverse ferret for the ages, denying that Stonewall has ever inflicted any sort of revenge on anyone who refused to go along with its “trans women are women” mantra, blaming the experts for not informing her better about what was happening in gender clinics and generally denying any responsibility for anything. 

Too many people have too many receipts for Hunt’s reverse ferret to work. Here’s Allison Bailey talking about how Stonewall went after her job because she refused to say that “trans women are women”:

1/ According to Ruth Hunt CEO of Stonewall until 2019, “It’s perfectly legitimate for Stonewall to advocate that position [that transwomen are women]. It doesn’t say ‘trans women are women’ and if you disagree, *we’re going to do something terrible to you*”

— Allison Bailey (@BluskyeAllison) April 13, 2024

Here’s Anya Palmer, Stonewall’s second employee, talking about how Stonewall, and Ruth Hunt, enforced “no debate”:

Ruth Hunt personally told me that if she got to be Stonewall CEO, Stonewall would not take on trans issues. When she got the job, the first thing she did was take on trans issues. And told staff anyone who disagreed could leave. I call that "No debate"https://t.co/C4ckpK4MvR

— Anya Palmer (@anyabike) April 13, 2024

Here’s my own story of how, under Hunt’s leadership, Stonewall sought to make it impossible to do balanced journalism on gender issues:

It was in 2017 that I first realised there was something up between women's rights and transgender activism. I was earlier than some, to notice, later than others. So I dropped a polite email to Stonewall's press office asking for a briefing. 1/8 https://t.co/vpEe2wdLuZ

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) April 13, 2024

And here’s Transgender Trend, who wrote guidance on trans issues for schools in 2018 that post-Cass looks prescient: Stonewall instructed schools to “shred it”: 

All evidence in our schools guide was available in 2018 and is now vindicated by the Cass report.

Yet Stonewall did everything they could to discredit us and suppress it.

We ask why Ruth Hunt still thinks our guide, fully compatible with Cass, is "bad."https://t.co/Gs5rrS0YzE

— TransgenderTrend (@Transgendertrd) April 15, 2024

But the very worst thing about the article is Hunt’s sanctimonious tone. I read the article out to my 18-year-old (my family put up with a lot), and when I’d finished he patted me on the shoulder, looked me in the eyes and said: “It’s alright, mum. Ruth Hunt forgives you for being a transphobe.”

So for  the good of the cause – and my sanity – I’ll try to calm down and stop feeling angry about pretty much anyone else. But not Ruth Hunt.