The MAGA hopeful is Captain Samuel Boaz Brown, a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention and an army veteran from the war in Afghanistan. His face was disfigured by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, making him the personification of the slings and arrows that all-American masculinity must endure. He has been the recipient of $60 million in “dark money” campaign contributions targeting his well-heeled opponent, Jacky Rosen, the only female Jewish member of the Senate, who paid her way through college by working as a waitress at Caesar’s Palace.

In Sin City, the contest is reaching its final frantic stages. Barack Obama recently parachuted in for the cause, declaring that the Nevada race was decisive, and that every vote would count, and that pulling the lever for a woman didn’t automatically qualify you as a cuck. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have each dropped into the state on several occasions to put in the fix, not to mention their running mates, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, and surrogates ranging from Bernie Sanders to Vivek Ramaswamy. Nearly three-quarters of Nevada voters live in Clark County, home of the Vegas Strip and more than 1.7 million voters. Yet the outcome of the Silver State’s last Senate race came down to a mere 7,928 votes. Long division yields a rather startling statistic: control of the upper house of the United States Congress could come down to fewer than five votes per precinct.

With the fate of America on the line, I leaped in a cab to the Las Vegas strip, where desperate ads for half-price lawyers gave way to glimmering billboards for semaglutides and Movado watches. As my cab driver Mohammed steered us through the land of Adele and Donny, he shook his head. “This is a very significant election,” he told me. “This country is at a crossroads.” And then, employing the metaphors of his trade, he added rather ominously: “If you make a wrong turn, you may never find yourself again.”

The words turned out to be an apt metaphor for Vegas, where the zonked-out debris of bachelor parties were zombifying aimlessly among the roulette tables, along with the usual assortment of super-sized aloha-shirted psychotics, ladies in overalls and Birkenstocks, and phlegm-hocking old-timers guiding their electric wheelchairs from slot to slot.

I had expected the epicentre for the heavyweight fight between Captain MAGA and “Wacky Jacky” to be bristling with political antagonism, but there was no sign of the impending American moment of truth anywhere. Earlier that day, I had ventured beyond the strip into honky-tonk nowheresville to find Captain Brown’s HQ, hidden among concrete and metal sheds with dusty signs boasting “Houston TX Hot Chicken” and “NY Pizza and Pasta”. But the front doors were locked, and there was not a soul in sight. The Rosen campaign headquarters, nestled among the wedding chapels of South Las Vegas Boulevard, had also been abandoned — most likely for Reno.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump's strange sincerity

By Christopher Caldwell

The only sign of a fight was on television. I soon lost count of the flat-screens silently spewing American football games, but every time a massive lineman fell to yet another spinal cord injury the broadcast turned to a commercial — and the dire political rhetoric: Sam Brown was an extremist. Sam Brown would push to ban abortion. Sam Brown would take away women’s right to choose. None of which appeared to be having much of an impact on the blackjack dealers — that is, the people that lived in Clark County. One of these locals, an Ethiopian immigrant, appeared surprised that I might ask him about the election, and who he might support. “I have not paid enough attention yet,” he said. “I will next week.”

From the Bellagio, I ambled across the outdoor escalators and pedestrian bridges — where quite a few homeless people had passed out to the sounds of the requisite Elvis impersonator — to Caesar’s Palace. I imagined that here I might find some signs of support for their all-star cocktail waitress alumna, Senator Jacky Rosen, but just as the Old Fashioneds and the Gin Fizzes had transmogrified into Basil Cucumber Margaritas and Kimbo Espresso Martinis, the cocktails are no longer delivered by stiffly smiling twenty-somethings in skimpy outfits trying to scrape enough together for state-school tuition. The ambitious youngsters had in all likelihood switched to more remunerative ventures than tips, such as OnlyFans, while Rosen’s old stomping grounds had become the domain of beefy expat Cubans discussing in great detail the nuances of the Dodgers bullpen as compared to the Yankees. Immigration? The wall? Venezuelan gang violence? Transgéneros playing women’s soccer? Not a word.

It was becoming more and more evident that I had made a big mistake, for I had been under the romantic delusion shared by generations of journalists that among the grand hotels of the mobbed-up, sexed-up, and algorithm-ruled Las Vegas Boulevard, one might catch a preview of America’s dark future. There’s plenty to suggest that the apocalypse begins here: as Lake Mead runs dry, as last summer’s temperature hit 120°F, breaking all previous records, and as sex work and gambling and criminal capitalism have become the norm.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed that America’s worst habits all emanate from here. In 1968, two professors from Yale’s Graduate School of Architecture brought 13 of their students here to study the surreal urban landscape. The result was the book, Learning from Las Vegas, which argued that instead of being viewed as a decadent relic of the dusty western dereliction, Vegas was a harbinger of things to come. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, flocks of so-called “new journalists” made a name for themselves by studying the human landscape. Hunter S. Thompson’s epic of gonzo journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, delivered a premonition of the drug culture that was then a matter of national hysteria, but would soon become humdrum. Joan Didion’s “Marrying Absurd” explored the strip’s strange custom of drive-through nuptials, which rocked her establishment sensibilities. And Tom Wolfe’s maniacal essay for Esquire Magazine, “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas !!!!” exposed the casinos as the test-case for ADD years before our national attention span dropped to five-seconds with the advent of smartphones. No doubt, the algorithms of cards and dice were precursors to the digital algorithms that have become our nation’s collective addiction.

But if American Armageddon was indeed looming in the casinos of post-MAGA Vegas, it appeared that nobody cared. The city’s gamblers, croupiers and wannabe stars were far too concerned with their own prospects of fame and fortune to fret about America’s fate.

There was, however, one issue that did resound over the din of the jackpots. Sex. Perhaps it was fitting that in Sin City, both Left and Right are leaning into the politics of sex. As might be expected, Captain Brown has praised Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, framing the restriction on discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools as a necessary measure to prevent the “indoctrination” of children into queerness. He has opposed marriage equality and supported legislation allowing discrimination against same-sex couples. And as president and chairman of the Nevada Faith and Freedom Coalition, he has decried the Respect for Marriage Act which President Biden signed in 2022, declaring the law an assault on religious freedom. That said, Brown cannot come out as 100% anti-abortion, as 76% of Nevadans support abortion rights.

When it comes to sexual politics, the contrast with Rosen could not be more pronounced. The freshman senator introduced the Equality Act to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment and housing. She co-sponsored the Respect for Marriage Act, recognises Pride Month, and has been endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer civil rights organisation.

None of which appeared to matter to the bros at the slot machines, but all of which matters a great deal to Las Vegas’s thriving LGBTQ community. GLAAD estimates that 145,000 LGBTQ people live in Nevada, with more than one in five of them raising children. Nor is it news that if love is love then sex is sex in this neck of the desert, as all the clubs, from high-end Zouk and TAO to cellar dwellers such as the Palomino and Discopussy are as apt to feature gay as straight strippers, and drag show brunches are as prevalent as traditionally cis-gender feathers, leather, and lace.

In this regard, Las Vegas is once again at the forefront of national politics, for the question of LGBTQ rights has come to dominate the American election cycle. The past few years of public outcry over commingling biological males and females in college sports has powered what was once a peripheral issue to the centre of American reaction. So far, various Right-wing PACs have dropped $17 million on more than 30,000 30-second spots attacking Kamala Harris for her stance on transgender athletes, which as National Public Radio noted, were focused on NFL and college football broadcasts.

Sensing liberal weakness on the flashpoint of boys playing with girls, Captain Brown made a point of showing up for a photo-op with the University of Nevada’s Wolf Pack women’s volleyball team, which gained national attention after some members refused to take the court against the San Jose State Spartans, which includes a transgender player. “I stand with them,” declared Brown. “Let’s make sure that this is the fight that we’re in ’til the end.” The issue loomed large over Brown and Rosen’s single debate, impelling the Las Vegas Review to blare the headline: “Transgender sports rift is officially a Nevada election issue.”

Once again, Las Vegas is America’s crystal ball. No doubt, the results in Nevada will provide a peek into the legislative prospects of same-sex marriage, marriage equality, gender-affirming medical treatment, sex education, and various and sundry in-school “Don’t Say Gay” rules and regs all over America. Not to mention the hot-button issue of drag queen story hour for the kiddies, as bans are considered in Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma and Utah.

Suggested reading

The mythical masculinity of Donald Trump

By Frederick Kaufman

Forget about climate change and genocide in Sudan. Who cares that the world is teetering on World War Three? In America, where the Dow is up, sex and drugs are cheap, and the cheeseburgers excellent, the question of who will control the nuclear codes has come down to women’s volleyball.

After a while spent contemplating this fact, and four glasses of watered-down Sauvignon Blanc later (the preferred drink of East Coast liberal journalists), I concluded that the most responsible decision would be to head over to the front lines of America’s LGBTQ wars, where multi-millionaire RuPaul, the world’s most famous drag queen, has been running his own franchised version of Trump’s The Apprentice: RuPaul’s Drag Race Live! Las Vegas. As I purchased the $100 ticket, I had no doubt that it was here that America’s most sex-positive city would deliver its referendum as to whether or not the push for LGBTQ rights had gone too far — or not far enough.

RuPaul’s eponymous show was running at The Flamingo, a somewhat down-market hotel and casino across the street from The Bellagio and Caesar’s Palace, which refreshingly offers no pretence of grandeur. The second show of “Queens Are Wild” Drag Race began late, so the alcohol had had plenty of time to achieve its cumulative effects on the tourists, who were boozily cheering each other on at the tables. I waited in line, madly deleting tsunamis of Jacky Rosen fundraising e-mails from my phone, which were now landing at a frantic pace. If she didn’t get her $750,000 by midnight, she’d be cooked.

I’m not a heavy consumer of the drag show, so it came as a surprise that ground zero of the trans menace emanated a rather wholesome vibe, completely lacking in the creepy concupiscence wafting over from the XX strippers on stage a dozen or so steps to the left. I was also delighted to find that RuPaul drag race fans are an intellectual lot, as the two women from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who shared my table held forth on the nuances of every queen going back 16 seasons.

More from this author

How the Diddy Conspiracy duped America

By Frederick Kaufman

The lights dimmed and then, for the first time since I’d landed, there was Kamala Harris in her lavender pants suit, flashing her smile on giant twin screens. Quiet engulfed the crowd as her voice filled the room. “We are all in this together,” she said. “Your vote is your power.” The crowd erupted into a spontaneous amen — yes, quite literally, “Amen”. Carried away by religious fervour, the two women from Iowa gleefully shouted: “You better work, Bitch!”

I shouldn’t have been shocked by such an enthusiastic response. After all, the greatest political motivator is victimhood. Trump plays the card all the time, hustling his mugshot t-shirts and bloody-ear coffee mugs, declaring the libs are coming after him endlessly, unfairly, unjustly. So why shouldn’t the LGBTQ community and their allies use their own persecution by anti-gay legislators as a means of rallying the base — even if Kamala’s lavender pants-suit was giving off a strictly asexual Hillary Clinton vibe.

After a Seventies disco number and a cheeky Britney hit, it seemed absolutely normal to see Barack Obama appear on those same gigantic screens, reminding us of the politics of love. In doing so, he cemented the unlikely fact that a drag show at The Flamingo was the one place in Clark County, Nevada that was fully realising our fraught political moment. Who would have expected such political punch from a show featuring sculpted dance boys wearing assless purple chaps? Or that the half-naked crew would reach their writhing climax holding placards with the plea: “Register to Vote.”

It was a refreshing moment: a community under attack was fighting the good fight. There was, perhaps, some hope left for America. Either that, or we were all about to be consumed by terminal victimhood. And so it was back to the chaos of the casino floor, where the future was as secure as craps.

Things are different now. Every TV show has a gay character of one kind or another. The days of scouring the Hollyoaks omnibus for the John Paul storyline are long gone. The world is brimming with “LGBTQ+ content”. So it is odd that the range of film and TV about gay men doesn’t feel much broader than it was when I was young. Higher volume does not seem to have led to greater variety. Instead, we find a careful curation of how gay men are presented on screen, even when such presentation flies in the face of reality. An example of this curation occurred last year. Netflix’s Dahmer caused a minor online fracas when it premiered. The issue was not only that yet another 10-part series about yet another brutal serial killer is a tasteless way for a streaming service to win eyeballs. No, the problem was that Netflix had categorised its gory new show as “LGBTQ”.

Dahmer is a long way from Will & Grace, but you can see why some hapless Netflix worker slapped the LGBTQ tag on the show. Jeffrey Dahmer haunted gay clubs and preyed on gay men. His particular sickness was bound up with young male bodies. And it can’t be denied that Dahmer highlights the risks inherent in the anonymous hook-up culture that many gay men will dabble in at some point. Such risks are perhaps even greater in today’s world of lengthening digital shadows, as illustrated by murders of gay men in Sligo and London, where the killers found their victims not in bars, but on Grindr. Dahmer makes for grim viewing, but it is of gay interest — if only as a reminder that evil doesn’t wear a sandwich board.

I don’t have a strong view on whether or not Netflix was right to classify Dahmer as “LGBTQ”. If anything, the fact that the debate happened at all struck me as faintly comic. The effort to police the content of one sub-category on one streaming service feels misplaced — if the image of gay men is so easily tarnished, then there are bigger problems to deal with. Today, Dahmer is categorised under “US TV Programmes”. Jeffrey Dahmer might not have been the right kind of gay man, but you can’t deny that he was American.

So what is the right kind of gay man? What sort of show does qualify for inclusion in the LGBTQ category? One popular offering on Netflix is Heartstopper, a series that focuses on a burgeoning romance between two teenage boys. If John Lewis made a LGBTQ television show, the result would look a lot like Heartstopper. Fluffy jumpers. Snow angels. Awkward smiles. It’s all very sweet. Characters endure some implausibly vanilla bullying, but spend most of their time exchanging emojis and shy little kisses.

More from this author

People are still being buried alive

By Alexander Poots

I am not the first to observe that Heartstopper is an oddly chaste affair given that the central protagonists are teenage boys, hardly a demographic famed for sexual restraint. But Heartstopper isn’t made for teenage boys. It’s not even for gay teenage boys, although I’m sure that many of them watch and enjoy it. This show unfolds in the rigidly ordered territory of the tweenage girl, a dreamscape in which young men are desirable precisely because they are unattainable, meaning that there is no risk of being desired in return. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean you have to look elsewhere for contemporary TV or film that is interested in gay men for their own sake.

This is surprisingly difficult at the moment. Young Royals is a Netflix drama based on one of Hollywood’s ropier elevator pitches: what if the heir to the Swedish throne was gay? Over on Amazon we find Red, White & Royal Blue, a film which asks the question: what if the heir to the British throne was gay? These are fun, silly productions, and are beloved by thousands. But again, they use male homosexuality to advance plot. They feature gay men, but they are not about them.

Naturally, there have been more serious attempts to capture gay male experiences in recent years. Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name have both entered the glitter canon; the former celebrated for its story of memory and survival, the latter for its tinted, self-absorbed charm. They are beautiful films, but neither made me laugh, and a gay film without humour isn’t very gay at all. To my mind, one of the better recent gay films is The Happy Prince, in which an extravagantly fat-suited Rupert Everett portrays Oscar Wilde’s last days in Parisian exile. Everett’s Wilde rolls down the boulevards, guzzles champagne, falls off tables and leaks brown bile. The film succeeds because it is bleak and because it is funny.

Bleak and funny. These are the qualities that I want from a film about gay men. Humour is especially important. If there’s one common thread to the films and TV in the Netflix LGBTQ category, it is an absence of laughter. Until recently, I had come to believe that this humourlessness was total. Gay men on screen would be forever trapped on a continuum with Call Me By Your Name at one end and Heartstopper at the other, doomed to be either a melancholy, piano-playing twink or an improbably earnest YA character. So when Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun premiered last summer, I was delighted. The film is a crime thriller and a wince-inducing critique of contemporary gay culture. Above all, it is extremely funny. Here was the cackling in the dark I had been craving.

Suggested reading

What's the point of a gay dating show?

By John Maier

The film stars Silva and Jordan Firstman, both playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Sebastián is a gay man of the Von Aschenbach school. An artist — a filmmaker, in this case — who thinks about death a lot. He lazes around his Mexico City apartment and researches suicide methods while his maid does the dishes. Every so often he opens the fridge. There isn’t any food in there, just two bottles of amyl nitrate. Sebastián takes a deep huff and goes back to bed. Later, he’ll enjoy some plump lines of ketamine for dessert.

Sebastián goes to a gay beach for a change of scene. Naked men grunt and gargle in the dunes. Sebastián sits on the sand reading E. M. Cioran (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy). Tadzio never makes an appearance. Instead he meets Jordan, an American tourist and professional Instagram influencer. Things go downhill from there. It is difficult to describe what makes Jordan so irritating. There is an immediate presumption of total intimacy with Sebastián that is alarming, almost psychotic. There is the ceaseless chatter, countless words advancing like the Golden Horde across the steppe. There is the lack of content, let alone meaning, to anything that he says. Even his smile is annoying.

Silva does annoying very well. Rotting in the Sun is as much about irritation as anything else. The film opens on a public square in which rival buskers create a nightmarish mashup of “Jingle Bells” and “Zombie” by The Cranberries. A random woman accuses Sebastián of abusing his coprophage dog. His apartment complex is a chaotic building site. Work is a series of voice notes and juddering Zoom calls. Even his gay beach holiday is a source of vexation. Press about the film focused on the large number of male genitals on display, but there is nothing titillating about any of them. They are obtrusive and ridiculous. Far from evidence of liberation, all of those cocks feel like an imposition to Sebastián. It all begs the question of what he is doing there in the first place. This is a hell of his own devising.

Jordan is a social barnacle, and Sebastián is his chosen rock. “I love you,” he says, five minutes into their acquaintance. He wants Sebastián to work on a film with him — a film about him. When Sebastián finally lashes out, Jordan responds: “You can’t hurt me, because I’m happy.” He is almost convincing. Rotting in the Sun is a bleak, hilarious satire. Like all true satire, the film is resolutely focused on the world as it actually is. There are no snow angels, no golden Italian summers. Part of the film’s strength comes from its focus on men in their thirties. Illusions have departed. For Sebastián, this means a retreat into comfortable angst. Jordan is the true realist. Instagram for money, drugs and sex for fun.

More from this author

Artists have forgotten how to draw

By Alexander Poots

As Silva has been at pains to point out in interviews, this is not a portrayal of all gay men. Still, these are types — stunted wallower, fragile clown — that are instantly recognisable to many of us. To see them lampooned is a pleasure. But this is more than a piss-take. Both characters are vindicated by the end of the film. A Cioran-esque twist confirms Sebastián’s bleak worldview, while Jordan’s forcefulness becomes an endearing strength. These men are ridiculous, but that doesn’t make them wrong. Not entirely, anyway.

I enjoyed Rotting in the Sun for its comedy and its honesty. The two go together, I think. If the kind of gay men we see on screen are for the most part bland and humourless, it is because most filmmakers aren’t especially interested in gay lives as they are actually lived. Of course, there will always be a place for shows like Heartstopper and Young Royals. Cosy Teen Nonsense has been a recognisable genre since the days of Dawson’s Creek, and there is no reason why there shouldn’t be the occasional gay iteration.

But there needs to be room for honesty, too. At times I wonder if we have exchanged the predictability of Canal+ gay films for the predictability of a safe teen romance, eternally retold. I want more than that. I want annoying gay men in my gay films, and I want to be invited to laugh at them. And if there’s a bicycle ride followed by a beautifully lit sex scene in there too, well, I won’t complain.

For Maria, the chance to work for one of Oxfam’s global outreach programmes, helping to end violence against women in the workplace, was a dream come true. And for a few years, it was — right up until the moment a fellow co-worker asked on an internal messageboard if Oxfam shops should ban the sale of J.K. Rowling’s books.

Three years ago, the Harry Potter author found herself accused of transphobia for having supported women who have “concerns around single-sex spaces”. During a discussion on Oxfam’s intranet, Maria had come to the defence of Britain’s most popular living author, asking for evidence of Rowling’s supposed transphobia. It was a decision that prompted a gruelling internal investigation, one in which Maria struggled to clear her name, led to her having a nervous breakdown and leaving both her job and the country.

Oxfam eventually offered a grovelling apology for the “procedural mistakes” that caused Maria such upset, but she is still struggling to make sense of it all. Speaking for the first time about the episode, she reveals: “My life has been torn apart. It drove me to a breakdown, I lost my confidence and, worst of all, I began to doubt myself.”

What Maria endured is part of a wider woke culture in the charitable sector, where female employees are silenced and treated like bigots for believing that sex-based rights matter. Certainly, Maria is so convinced that her career remains in danger — that any woman accused of transphobia will be blacklisted by much of the charitable sector, even when they have been exonerated — that she has agreed to speak to UnHerd under a pseudonym. “This will hang over me for the rest of my life,” she says. For decades, Oxfam — which was formed in 1942 to send food supplies to starving mothers and children in Nazi-occupied Greece — was one of the UK’s most respected charities, providing international aid to end hardship around the globe. But in recent years, its reputation has been tarnished. In 2018, evidence emerged that senior staff had paid survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake for sex, and that the use of prostitutes during the relief effort was covered up by the charity, allegations that Oxfam denies.

It was Maria’s concern for vulnerable women that first drew her to work for Oxfam: “I have experienced rape and domestic violence in the past, so I wanted to help others in the same situation.” Born in Spain, where she had worked as a pre-school teacher and volunteered at a sexual assault centre, she moved to the UK in 2017.

More from this author

'I will never call my rapist father a woman'

By Julie Bindel

“I loved my job,” says Maria, “being able to see how Oxfam’s work improves the lives of other women and children.” Three years after joining the charity, she was promoted to a co-ordinating role within the women’s rights team, whose remit was to ensure that female equality was reflected in Oxfam’s work.

She realised almost immediately how impossible that aim would be, given the growing dominance of a pro-trans mindset within Oxfam. Along with many other charities and institutions, it had capitulated to gender-based ideals, ones that asserts that “trans women are women” and that the categories of male and female are on a spectrum, rather than biological realities. On the advice of Stonewall — the discredited charity whose workplace diversity scheme sought to “recognise and celebrate the efforts of leading employers to advance LGBT inclusion” — Oxfam advised its employees to state their pronouns in meetings and on correspondence. “It was regularly using Stonewall materials to advise staff on LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace, with a heavy emphasis on transgender ideology above all else.”

Maria says that she initially toed the party line on the matter, staying silent when trans issues were discussed. “But then I began to see how women’s rights were attacked, particularly because it was obvious that single-sex spaces, such as rape crisis centres, were labelled as ‘anti-trans’.”

Suggested reading

The Oxford kids are alright

By Kathleen Stock

Oxfam staff were invited to join company-wide online groups related to their interests, and Maria joined the LGBTQ+ group. In September 2020, a charity shop manager asked the group: “What is your opinion on selling J.K. Rowling books?” The employee, who is a transwoman, worried that the writer’s latest thriller, Troubled Blood, written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, might be “highly transphobic”. She wondered whether it might be covered by Oxfam’s “unsuitable for sale” policy.

Several staff engaged with the forum thread, widening the debate to include Rowling’s suitability as an Oxfam-stocked author, and added their concerns about her supposed transphobia, until Maria asked the question: “Can you explain why she is transphobic or why the book is transphobic?” When her query went unanswered, Maria went on to express concerns about banning books by “one of the most important woman writers in the UK”, before adding: “Actually, we are selling books from paedophiles and rapists. We are selling religious books. Stopping selling something we don’t like is called censorship and is the opposite of freedom of speech.”

The manager then left the conversation, and Maria thought that was the end of the matter. “She had said she was uncomfortable with the conversation and did not want to discuss it any further.” But following the exchange, Maria discovered she had been labelled in private chats as a transphobic bigot by other members of the LGBTQ+ group. Another manager sent her private messages, suggesting that Maria could lose her job after posting her comments. “They felt threatening to me,” says Maria. “She said my views were ‘incredible’, and that she would be reporting me. There is absolutely no way I am anti-trans. I am merely pro-women’s rights.”

Suggested reading

Why should lesbians sleep with men?

By Kathleen Stock

In the next few days, members of the LGBTQ+ group encouraged colleagues to complain about the discussion, stating that “transphobia is not tolerated here”. “They did not name me, but it was obvious who they were referring to,” says Maria. Next, a petition signed by 70 staff members was sent to all staff via the intranet, calling for Oxfam’s leadership to “take a stand” and “communicate a zero-tolerance approach to transphobia”.

Senior management replied to the petition authors, saying: “No one in our organisation should be subjected to hate speech, discrimination or other forms of harm” and “It is of great concern that members of the wider LGBTQIA+ community have felt intimidated by workplace conversations.” Oxfam’s CEO got involved, and gave a “no-debate” steer, adding: “We value the experience of our trans and non-binary colleagues, friends and partners and we do not expect their experience to be debated in our workplace.”

Three days later, Maria was invited to a meeting with her line manager and a member of Human Resources and told that she was under investigation because of her “transphobic comments”. Maria says: “They should have told me what the actual topic of the meeting was, and I could have brought a union representative with me. I apologised for upsetting anyone and tried to outline the rationale for my views and beliefs, but they refused to accept it.” Signed off sick with anxiety and depression, Maria felt alone and scared of losing her job, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. “All my family and relatives were in Spain and the borders were closed.”

Six weeks later, two days before Christmas, Maria learned that she’d been found guilty of misconduct and was issued with a final warning. Oxfam told Maria that her comments online “breached the requirement of the Code of Conduct to treat all persons with respect and dignity”, and reminded her that “transgender people are protected from discrimination under the Equality Act 2010”. The letter did not give a definition of transphobia or say how her posts were transphobic. Refusing to accept that finding, Maria appealed. “As a woman I have always had to fight for everything,” she says. “I knew that if they beat me then they were trampling on all of us.”

More from this author

JK Rowling and the lunch of secrets

By Julie Bindel

Three months later, Maria was informed she had lost her appeal. The letter informing her of this decision also offered, for the first time, a definition of transphobia (not for want of asking): “Oxfam refers to Stonewall definitions to support our understanding, which states transphobia is the ‘fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans’.” Feeling she was left with no choice but to resign, Maria took Oxfam to an employment tribunal. “I became determined that this should not happen to another woman,” she says.

Maria claimed constructive dismissal and belief discrimination. In July last year, during judicial mediation, both parties agreed to settle, with Oxfam issuing a public apology for its handling of the process. “We believe that each member of our community has a right to their own religious or philosophical beliefs, including the belief that ‘sex is immutable’ and ‘sex is important’. We acknowledge that in dealing with your case and during the disciplinary process we made mistakes. We acknowledged that it was not appropriate to give you a final written warning, and we would like to offer our sincere apologies for the upset that this has caused you.”

Earlier this year, Oxfam updated its language guide, which is an internal document advising staff how to speak about its work. The document includes the instruction that, rather than using the phrases “biological male” and “biological female”, “AMAB and AFAB” (assigned male/female at birth), should be used instead; and when talking about “expectant mothers”, use the phrase “people who become pregnant”.

More from this author

I was hounded out of school for 'transphobia'

By Julie Bindel

“I hope every single woman, especially those stronger and richer than me, fight every time this happens within the charity sector,” Maria says. “Oxfam is supposed to be protecting women and girls in the most vulnerable situations all over the world, and this ideology will ruin it.”

In response, an Oxfam spokesperson said: “We are sorry for the procedural mistakes we made in the handling of this case and we have apologised to the individual concerned. We fully support both an individual’s right to hold religious and philosophical beliefs and a person’s right to have their identity respected, regardless of their gender identity and expression, sex, or sexuality. We believe LGBTQIA+ rights are human rights.”

Now back in Spain, Maria has just finished an internship at a refugee camp in Greece, with the aim of a career in humanitarian work. “I lost so many friends,” she tells me. “I lost my job. My mental health suffered. Enforcing the views of the trans lobby, at all costs, seems more important to Oxfam than meeting their actual charitable aims.”

She says she often thinks of the author who changed the course of her life — and believes the way Rowling has been vilified for simply supporting and defending the rights of women who have suffered domestic abuse and rape is proof that misogyny has no limits. “No matter how much money or power you have achieved, if you are a woman, you will always be a target,” says Maria. “I fought my case so that all women know they can fight, and win, against this crazed ideology.”

Perhaps you’ve already guessed it, readers, but it seems that No More Secrets is not just about lambs, wolves, and sweets. No, it’s also about teachers changing the pronouns and otherwise affirming the gender identities of school children behind parents’ backs. Self-described queer educators are a staple of Libs of TikTok, along with other narcissists filming themselves doing or saying nonsensical things in the name of social justice: transwomen complaining about their non-existent periods, white women castigating other white women for denying they’re racist, drag queens pole dancing for babies, and so on. Raichik offers these snippets up to her 1.9 million followers daily, for general Right-wing mockery and headshaking about moral decline.

Raichik’s enemies loathe her, presenting her as anti-LGBT and far-Right. Whether or not that’s true, based on the evidence available, we at least can say with confidence that she’s no Roald Dahl. Never mind the wise author’s rule of “show, don’t tell” — Raichik can’t even seem to manage “tell, don’t send readers into a coma”. An advertised book extract describes the moment where Rose the lamb breaks down and confides in her parents over a game of Scrabble:

“‘Oh Rose, that’s not good,’ said her father. ‘It’s important you let us know right away if anyone tells you to keep a secret from us.’ So Rose told her parents everything about the candy and Mr. Wooly. Rose’s father put his arm around her and encouraged her, letting her know that she had done the right thing by coming to him. Rose felt very thankful that she was honest and that her parents helped her with this tricky situation.”

Crushing as this style is, Raichik’s book fits squarely within an emerging genre in children’s publishing, whose function is to counter-indoctrinate children from the Right in the most bluntly obvious of ways. Classics of the genre already include Matt Walsh’s Johnny The Walrus, about a small boy who likes dressing up as a walrus, until his mother gets pressured by the “internet people” to take him to the doctor to have his hands and feet surgically turned into flippers. (I think we can all see where Matt is going with this.)

And then there’s The Parrots Go Bananas!, also from Raichik’s publisher, Brave Books — the tale of a band of parrots determined to ruin the reputation of two monkeys, Bongo and Asher. This was written by Sean Spicer, a former White House Press Secretary and Acting Communications Director for Donald Trump, in order to “reveal the danger of spreading lies”. Brave Books has a lot of other titles too: Little Lives Matter, for instance, about the sanctity of early life, and The Island of Free Ice-Cream, about capitalism versus communism. Indeed, for those with some time on their hands, I recommend the Brave Books website as the source of a fun new game — guess the culture war angle, based on book titles alone! Elephants Are Not Birds may be an easy one to begin with (gender again), but how about Paws Off My Cannon? Is this about the perils of excessive masturbation or the importance of the Second Amendment? (Answer: the latter).

More from this author

Why I broke up with Dua Lipa

By Kathleen Stock

The Right didn’t start this, of course. In 1920, Nikolai Bukharin wrote under Soviet communism that “the salvation of the young mind and the freeing of it from the noxious reactionary beliefs of their parents is one of the highest aims of the proletarian government”.  Back then, the Left-wing preference was for children’s stories about selfless workers versus the evil bourgeoisie. These days it’s all gay penguin dads, mermaids called Julian, and anti-racist babies. But whether from Right or Left, if you strongly disagree with a particular political ideology and yet see it writ large across a hundred texts aimed at children, it can feel imperative to fight back hard. Children are literally the future, after all. To some, it may seem obvious that, where one political side is desperately trying to indoctrinate the young, the other should adopt just as aggressive counter-measures in response. I’m not so sure, though.

For a start, it’s an open question whether any of these books work on kids as intended. Granted, if Facebook is anything to go by, the world is not short of children parroting favoured political attitudes to the delight of their parents — “so proud of this kiddo for coming out to the pro-life/anti-abortion [delete as appropriate] rally with me, and even making her own placard!” etc. — but that hardly establishes anything Freud hasn’t already explained. And we can’t tell for sure to what extent reading one particular book, or a few, actually shapes young minds, given how hard it is generally to associate any single childhood influence with moral development in a particular direction. The combined cultural forces coming at a child are immense and overwhelming, and rarely can be reduced to any single particularly influential factor.

What does seem true is that, in the short term at least, heavy-handed moralising tends to send some contrarian-minded children to the opposite pole out of sheer rebelliousness. Had my junior self been confronted by drippy Rose the lamb and her overbearingly sanctimonious parents, l feel I might well have been tempted to run straight into the arms of the nearest blue-haired, non-binary teaching assistant, begging to be rescued.

Suggested reading

The rise of the liberal groomer

By Mary Harrington

And there’s also the fact that, for each of these books to work as they are supposed to, the young reader should already have been exposed to the ideas of the ideological enemy. In reality, though, very few kids are likely to encounter both side of the aisle — and especially not given the sort of parent who would buy these books in the first place. Without insight into the other side, books such as Raichik’s and Walsh’s won’t make much sense to a young reader at all. Without knowing that Walsh’s story about the boy who dresses up as a walrus implicitly critiques the practice of medically transitioning youths, it reads like an inexplicably gruesome horror story – the mother wants to do what to her son? Surgically carve his hands into flippers? Equally, without prior exposure to the Right, children are not going to know there is any special ethical significance to the idea of gay penguin dads. They will probably just assume they are learning facts about the natural world.

But the biggest problem with any of these political forays into children’s publishing is that they are a performative war between two sets of adults that basically hate each other, with young minds as the battle terrain to be won or lost. Apart from anything else, this makes the books in question very boring. The best and most engaging children’s literature captures something about being a child and reflects it back in a way that they can understand. It can be anarchic, dream-like, funny, or sad, but it must talk first and most directly to the child, and only second to any adults eavesdropping. Books written in order to wage culture wars against other adults are unlikely to do this.

In the way that books such as Raichik’s use children’s literacy for adult ends, they are not so far away from a different form of literature-based performance, also happening this week: World Book Day. Once a year, modern parents are expected to dress their kid up as a favourite book character for school, and many take up the call very enthusiastically. For others, it’s an exercise in humiliation. My own days of fishing madly about in a meagre dressing-up box at 8.45am shouting expletives are over, but I remember the feeling. And there was also the embarrassing fact that my children did not really like reading books at all, and certainly not the sort of books that would send the “right” signals to my peers. The high point of my World Book Day career, if you can call it that, was when my 10-year-old son went in clutching the Top Gear Annual, dressed as his favourite fictional character, Jeremy Clarkson. (At the time, I just felt relieved because we already had the cords and a jumper.)

More from this author

The crucifixion of Kate Forbes

By Kathleen Stock

With occasions such as World Book Day, just as with the parental purchase of books like Raichik’s or their Left-wing equivalent, there is a strong sense of performance for other tribe members, and of children being used as somewhat bemused pawns in adult games. In a world where smartphones and X-Boxes loom distractingly on the horizon for most adolescents, where reading for pleasure is dying out among adults, and where English degrees are disappearing from universities, it probably feels important for the middle-classes to convince themselves that their children still read books and not just TikTok captions.

It’s hard to predict the future of World Book Day, and other such attempts to tell ourselves that valuable things from the past are still safe in our hands. Perhaps the culture wars will eventually result in Rose the conservative lamb squaring up to Julian the progressive mermaid in playgrounds across the nation. More probably though, the whole performance is already on its way out. Though it will cling on for a while as a form of historical re-enactment — kids in strange costumes gingerly holding up books in assembly, pretending they know what to do with them — eventually it will die, along with the desultory habits of reading that were used to rationalise its existence. And helping the whole process along will be books about non-binary giraffes and communist ice-cream sellers, written by axe-grinding political obsessives, killing off childish excitement at the written word one heavily pointed sentence at a time.

Today, he’d be left with nothing to write about: everybody wants a slice of the gay pie. You can’t get an invite to the rom com prom  without a sexual quirk or kink. LGBTQ is now recognised as a mainstream genre, something that caused Netflix considerable online grief when they put their Jeffrey Dahmer drama into it.

Along with this ubiquity arrives the accusation of “queerbaiting”. This weird little expression means either luring in the gays with the promise of something gay, and then not delivering, or using a “queer aesthetic” without being “queer” enough, or — horrors! — even at all. Dr Justin Bengry, lecturer in “Queer History” at Goldsmiths, recently told Euronews in fluent boilerplate: “We, as queer people, are right to demand ever more representation and celebration of our existence and the incredible variety and diversity within our communities.” He went on: “When we critique someone’s behaviour as ‘queer baiting’… we are accusing that they are wilfully misusing their privilege and even deceiving us about their own understanding of themself to attract attention and even benefit socially and financially.”

A confession. I think Channel 4’s Cucumber was a masterpiece. I enjoy the books of John Rechy. I think Frasier writer Joe Keenan’s novel trilogy beginning with Blue Heaven is sublime. But I find most gay culture, and nearly all “queer” culture, excruciatingly bad and frequently embarrassing. I have a theory that more gay teen wretchedness is caused by “empowering” gay culture, supposedly uplifting but horribly depressing, than anything else. I bought a book called How To Be A Happy Homosexual when I was 16 and it drove me to the outer edge of despair. The mere thought of The Communards, even now, makes me look hungrily towards the medicine cabinet.

The current craze for “representation” is nothing more than hollow fetishism, with all the vacuous, rictus-grinning “celebration” of an office party. It has not widened or improved gay culture, but simply bloated it. In fact, I often prefer it when straight people do the job: Bowie and early Suede, Marty Feldman and Barry Took writing for “Julian and Sandy” on Round The Horne, Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina in Prick Up Your Ears. Mary Renault and Barbara Pym wrote great books about gay men.

More from this author

What's wrong with being straight?

By Gareth Roberts

It is very strange to think that only homosexual artists can produce art that includes homosexuality, that only gay actors can act gay parts. When it happens the other way round, nobody even notices. Legions of lesbians and gaggles of gays have written hetero stories. Noel Coward wrote plays where young male characters have non-gay secrets — heterosexual affairs — and they function perfectly. James Baldwin wrote about white heterosexual people in a world where his gayness and his race were considerably more of an issue than they would be today, and he did it brilliantly.

I’d suggest not that there is no difference, but that good writers and good actors can traverse these boundaries in their stride. It is a strange criterion to be asked to judge art on its author’s characteristics, particularly as it has followed on from the same strain of cracked academia that gifted us “the death of the author”. As for queerbaiting? I’d suggest that like most things, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s good, depending on whether the artist is an astute observer and a natural empath — by which I don’t mean the modern version of empath, the loopy “be kind” TikTokker with mad staring eyes. A smart outsider can see things insiders miss and make great art from it.

Surely the right question to ask remains not “is this authentic?”, but “is this any good?”. I don’t care if I’ve been “baited” if what I’ve been baited with was worth it. Harry Styles is, of course, the baiter supreme, being coy about his incredibly obvious heterosexuality and sporting accessories from someone’s nan who passed away in 1973. In My Policeman, out couple of weeks ago, he plays a gay character who marries a woman to conceal his secret. But his work is offensive not because of this but because it is so bad.

Suggested reading

Why gay men ignored MeToo

By Jarryd Bartle

A little example of my own. I wrote a TV script about lads playing football and a heterosexual romance, and people were surprised. I found this very odd, as I had written about distant planets without having visited them and alien beings without having met any, and nobody had expressed the slightest surprise. It’s ironic that “queer” — something supposedly all about breaking categories, we are told — is so tight-arsed about people staying in their lane. But then, of course, queer isn’t actually about breaking down categories at all, but about inventing tons of new ones for status, goading people, and having big squabbles on the socials.

Gay men have certainly always been pretty good at self-baiting. Until fairly recently, gay magazine Attitude nearly always had a front cover of a semi-undraped young straight male starlet, often from Hollyoaks, with a teaser quote — something along the lines of “I’ve often wondered what it might be like to be taken suddenly from behind by a big old leather bear” — and a hint that this dreamboat might possibly flash their scrotum on page 53. This was supposed to act as gay catnip, and presumably did.

More from this author

Judith Butler's toxic nonsense

By Gareth Roberts

So what’s wrong with the gays acting as catnip for straights? Consider Heartstopper, a TV series about a gay male romance written by Alice Oseman, a woman who styles herself as “aromantic”, but who feels confident enough to churn out complicated tales of other people’s romantic lives. Good for her. It is notable that she is not lambasted for inauthenticity, but then she is fully signed up to the prevailing ideology, so she’s safe. But here is where fetishism comes in.

Writing about gays isn’t the same as seeking them as an audience. There is a small area of publishing — often self-publishing — full of erotic novels about gay men written by and, crucially, for straight women. (And of course a much larger, less delicately-presented, slab of it dedicated to straight men writing about lesbians.) This, and Heartstopper, is not a million miles away from Jackie magazine stories of yore. When something is an elevated masturbation fantasy, it is probably best to keep that in mind and not raise it above its lowly cultural rung. But where is the harm in it?

We often hear that the age of deference is gone. But this is not so. We just defer to different people. At the moment, for reasons unclear, we defer to American teenagers with peculiar ideas. When we emerge from this cultural tunnel we will hopefully be able to flit freely again around stories and people, whatever their sexual preferences. Yes, there might well be some terrible clangers and some unpleasant wanks out there. But these are the price we pay for approaching art with generous hearts and open minds.

Generous and open are two things that American teenagers trumpeting accusations of queerbaiting are not. And even the most progressive corners of the “LGBTQ” cultural establishment are starting to realise it. After Heartstopper star Kit Connor claimed, earlier this week, that queerbaiting allegations had “forced” him to come out as bisexual, even PinkNews took his side. This is a U-turn for a site that ran an explainer in 2018 about why queerbaiting was a “problem” — and hints that better days are to come. Days in which audience and cast alike don’t have to worry about who the other likes fucking.

On this issue, the Democratic Party assumes the mantle of righteousness. Who could oppose “life-saving” “gender-affirming care”? Who supports “conversion therapy”, which the Biden administration described as “a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people”?

The reality diverges sharply from the loaded language the Biden Administration deploys, lifting terms directly from the most radical trans activists occupying positions at the outermost extreme of an ongoing debate between different factions of gender clinicians.

The dispute over how best to treat gender-questioning children that the Biden Administration seeks to resolve by enshrining “gender-affirming care” and stigmatising “conversion therapy” boils down to whether or not clinicians regard the children in their care as exceptions to everything we know about child development, human biology, sexual orientation, and more. Attending closely to the language of the activists with whom the Biden Administration has sided provides a masterclass in how to manipulate language to normalise risky and invasive medical intervention on a class of people — children — who are widely understood to be unable to provide consent in other contexts.

For exploratory providers, a child’s transgender identification is the beginning of a clinical inquiry that will travel through the individual patient’s biography, their social context, and the templates the culture at large offers that young patients use to make sense of suffering. Nothing magical or transformative happens when a patient experiences gender dysphoria or expresses a transgender identity. Children and adolescents remain children and adolescents. Clinical practice does not overthrow itself when a young patient changes her pronouns.

For affirmative clinicians, on the other hand, the declaration of a transgender identity and the desire for a particular gender presentation suffice. That’s what affirmation means: no further inquiry required. A transfer of loyalty takes place when affirmative clinicians are confronted with “trans” children and adolescents: clinicians’ sense of responsibility shifts from the patient in front of them to the patient’s transgender “alter”. Doctor and patient then collude to slice and drug the patient’s body into compliance with the new identity regime.

Across the Atlantic, countries such as Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom are stepping back and shifting away from hormones and surgeries and toward exploratory psychotherapy as evidence of harm mounts. It’s remarkable that the United States government has chosen this moment to double down, without reference to serious inquiries underway at home and abroad.

More from this author

Why should lesbians have sex with men?

By Eliza Mondegreen

Rather than bending the arc of history toward justice, the Biden administration has put the full force of the federal government behind a treatment model that amounts to little more than an unregulated medical experiment on vulnerable children and adolescents. Don’t let the language of civil rights fool you.

To understand gender affirmation and the people who push it, we need to take a closer look at their belief in the utterly exceptional “transgender” child. What do affirmative clinicians believe about such a patient, who arrives in their office with a label firmly affixed? Affirmative care starts not with a question or a clinical assessment but with a moral imperative: validate the patient’s transgender identity.

Presented with a “transgender” patient, what else matters? Does a patient’s age or developmental stage matter? What about his or her sex or sexual orientation? What parts of a patient’s life story — or medical history — stand out?

Gender clinicians such as Johanna Olson-Kennedy prefer to talk about gender-questioning three-year-olds as “people”. And they are people. But when we talk about three-year-olds as “people”, rather than toddlers, important information gets lost, with consequences. When we talk about “people”, we think adults. We think autonomy. When we talk about “toddlers,” we think: tiny humans who need constant care and guidance, who cannot be trusted to brush their teeth or cross an empty street, much less start down a medical pathway.

That’s the reason Olson-Kennedy talks about “people” when she’s referring to toddlers. The ideas that underpin gender-affirming care lose their moral force when translated from “people know who they are” to “toddlers know who they are”.

What about sex and sexual orientation? As recently as the mid-2000s, medical providers understood cross-sex identification in childhood and adolescence to be a normal stage of homosexual development, resolving in the majority of cases as the child moved through adolescence and became comfortable with his or her sexual development and sexual orientation. Long before the concept of gender identity took root, the idea of being “born in the wrong body” resonated with many young gays and lesbians — not to mention medical providers, who viewed homosexuals as “inverts” in need of psychological or surgical “correction”.

Affirmative providers overlook, downplay, or outright deny the overrepresentation of same-sex attracted youth among youth seeking transition. But clinicians who rate the “gender presentation” of “transgender” preschoolers on a scale from stereotypical girl (fitted, sparkly, frilly) to stereotypical boy (baggy, sporty) inevitably sweep up children whose rejection of gender stereotypes is rooted in their same-sex orientation. Affirmative providers such as Diane Ehrensaft argue that “prototransgender youth use [same-sex] sexual identity as a stepping-stone toward their transgender true gender self”, a rhetorical move that overwrites the connection between homosexual development and gender dysphoria, and equates accepting your same-sex sexual orientation with pursuing irreversible medical interventions.

Suggested reading

The emptiness of being queer

By Kathleen Stock

Much like their views on same-sex attraction as a “stepping stone” toward a young person’s “transgender true gender self”, affirmative providers treat just about any mental health comorbidities as secondary to gender dysphoria. Suicide attempts, psychotic episodes, anorexia nervosa, depression, anxiety, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, experiences of sexual abuse and trauma, and substance abuse aren’t taken as reasons to question or delay transition but instead are treated as evidence for the need to accelerate transition.

In order to grease the skids, affirmative providers have invented or adapted a wide range of new medical concepts, all of which operate to obscure what they do from the public and from providers themselves,  scrambling the complex clinical presentations they need to parse — and manipulating patients, parents, and policymakers. These concepts include “wrong puberty”, “sex assigned at birth”, “reconstructive surgeries”,  and “internalised transphobia”.

Reconceptualising patients as “wrongly sexed” (thus in need of reconstructive relief) and giving allegiance over to the patient’s transgender “alter” over the physical patient and her social and medical history skew clinical assessments and lower clinicians’ barriers to providing experimental medical interventions. Girls become “boys”, not in reality, but in the way gender clinicians talk about reality. Elective double mastectomies on girls become “reconstructive chest surgery” on “boys”. Exploratory therapy to understand where distress over sex and gender originates becomes “conversion therapy,” something no ethical clinician would practice. Drastic, life-altering medical interventions — such as “pausing” puberty and all the cognitive, physical, and emotional development that goes along with it — become conceptualised as non-interventions on the one hand, “life-saving” on the other. In any case, language becomes detached from reality, skewing risk analysis.

This language of determined identities and autonomous “people” speak to the way affirmative clinicians see their role: deferring to patient self-identification and facilitating hormonal and surgical interventions to bring patients’ bodies in line with how they want to “wear their gender”, Meanwhile, activists inside the medical profession push for policy changes to lower the age at which minors can consent to transition — a priority of the forthcoming guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — and remove requirements for parental assent. California legislators are on the verge of passing a bill that would equate denial of “gender-affirming care” with child abuse, a move advocates say would turn California into a “sanctuary state” for trans-identifying children.

Ask for stronger evidence or stricter safeguarding measures and you’ll get an earful about suicide and self harm: affirmation is a “matter of life and death.” (Never mind that researchers had to cook bad survey data at extremely high temperatures in order to make such dire claims.)

Affirmative clinicians frequently compare gender dysphoria to endocrine conditions such as diabetes. Take Johanna Olson-Kennedy, dismissing the need to explore the causes of a young person’s distress over gender: “I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin”. Never mind that medical providers can test for diabetes (and monitor whether the treatment is working), while relying on patient testimony to initiate medical transition. Never mind that untreated diabetes kills. Analogies to cancer also abound, especially when clinicians need to justify serious risks like permanent loss of fertility and the very real possibility that patients will lead shorter, sicker lives after medical transition. Ask clinicians and they’ll tell you that gender dysphoria, like cancer, is a life-threatening condition. In the absence of supporting evidence, this is emotional extortion, nothing more.

Affirmative clinicians evade the possibility of regret and detransition. They prefer to talk about “gender fluidity” or “gender journeys”— “journeys” that may include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and elective double mastectomies. Journeys that could not and should not have been avoided, in other words.

Suggested reading

The kids aren't alright

By Hadley Freeman

Affirmative providers also cleave to a narrow set of explanations about why patients experience regret and detransition, pinning regret and detransition on lack of social support for the patient’s transgender identification. By placing the blame on factors outside the medical system, providers avoid the suggestion that regret and detransition may be the result of inadequate evaluation or inappropriate medical interventions. This interpretation also keeps patients firmly within the ideological framework that underlies affirmative care. Under this framework, a patient remains “really transgender”, even if external factors conspire to keep the patient from living out that identity. Even if the patient disavows their transgender identity entirely.

***

If affirmative providers’ belief in the exceptional “transgender” child bears out, we can make a strong case for affirmation. But if this belief is merely an article of faith, nothing more, clinicians risk doing serious harm to their patients under the banner of affirmation. In other words, if gender-dysphoric children and adolescents are truly exceptions to everything we know about identity formation, child and adolescent development, how humans make sense of distress and their susceptibility to social influence, the role of sexual orientation in gender dysphoria, and more, then affirmation may be the right approach.

But what if supporters of gender-affirming care are wrong?

What if children who identify as transgender are just that: children? What if they hurt, like other children? What if they’re trying to figure themselves out and learn how to navigate the strange world they live in, like other children?

What’s changed are the ideas and expectations that we’ve raised children on and the way we’ve turned them loose in an online world whose terrain no one has mapped. Many of these children have grown up with extended experiences of online disembodiment. They may not be free to run around outside with their friends but they’re free to roam the darkest corners of the Internet. Who knows what strangers and strange ideas they encounter there.

These children have grown up hearing a very new and confusing set of fairy tales about gendered souls that can end up in the ‘wrong bodies’. Adults who should know better — adults who do know better — have made these children impossible promises.

Children who identify as trans aren’t sages. They aren’t sacred. They haven’t been endowed with wisdom beyond their years. It’s not fair to treat them as exceptions to the safeguards we place around children, so that when they grow up and change their minds and ask why we let them do this, we say: You wanted it. You asked for it. You were so sure. What else could we have done?

There’s a way in which everything that touches trans must be exceptional — the children, the stakes, the feelings, the possibility of knowing anything for sure — because if these kids aren’t exceptional, then we threw everything we knew out the window. We didn’t ‘help’ exceptional children but harmed ordinary ones, struggling with ordinary challenges of development, sexual orientation, identity, meaning, and direction.

This month, media organisations and mega corporations will bend over backwards to find an LGBTQ angle to cover. But what you won’t see or hear is the underside of Pride: a culture of intense social and sexual pressure that’s pushing some lesbians back into the closet and encouraging others to identify out of womanhood altogether. 

It started with the push to redefine “lesbian” to be inclusive of heterosexual males who identify as women. But it didn’t stop there. Now same-sex attraction is out, redefined as a problematic “genital preference”. A surprising number of hardline activists vilify lesbians as “genital fetishists” and accuse them of practising “sexual apartheid”.

Suggested reading

Stella Creasy's bourgeois feminism

By Kathleen Stock

Meanwhile, lesbians are bombarded with suggestions on “how to have lesbian sex with a trans woman”. Safe-sex guides for lesbians provide information on avoiding pregnancy and performing blowjobs. Healthline’s “How Do Lesbians Have Sex?” guide, which targets sexually inexperienced women and girls, reminds readers that “any person can have any type of sex”. “[D]on’t apply assumptions you apply to cis men to us, our body works in different ways,” a columnist for Allure scolded readers: “Keep an open mind, and remember you’re having sex with a woman who knows more about her body than you do about hers.”

Not convinced yet? “Estrogenized dicks are… a lot like if a vagina was shaped like a dick and testes… Sex with an estrogenized dick is its own experience, but it’s MUCH MORE like sex with a vagina than sex with a man’s dick!” This remarkable advertisement concludes with a denial of what’s being pushed and why: 

“Don’t have sex with anyone you don’t want to! You don’t ever have to give a reason why you don’t want to have sex with someone… But if you go out of your way to tell everyone that you won’t have sex with trans women, and your reasoning is that you think trans women are men, and that sex with us is like sex with men, don’t be surprised when people call you out as an uninformed bigot!” 

Or, as one “trans lesbian” put it: “Being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts.”

Suggested reading

The fictional world of trans activism

By Kathleen Stock

Somehow, telling lesbians that they “just haven’t tried the right dick yet” went woke.

Young lesbians get the message — from their peers in the “queer” community, their role models in arts and culture, the media, and medical providers — that their discomfort with any of this means that they may really be straight men trapped in gay women’s bodies. Sometimes, adopting an idiosyncratic gender identity — like “transmasc non-binary who’s attracted to women” or “feminamoric” — may be the only way a young woman can set boundaries around her sex life.

Last year, two friends and I launched Unspeakable LGBTQ. We asked: What do you wish you could say about your experiences as a woman in the LGBTQ community? 

Some women talked about intense pressure to identify out of womanhood. When femininity — not sex — makes someone a “woman”, women who don’t conform to stereotypes come under scrutiny: “I wish I could talk about how non-conforming women are being pressured to identify as a different gender to validate transwomen’s ‘femininity,’” wrote one respondent. “Feeling alienated by femininity is a near-universal female experience, especially for gay and bisexual women — not something that means you’re not a woman at all,” wrote another. Another respondent confessed that she now feels “​more comfortable around my conservative neighbors than I do in ‘queer’ liberal circles because my neighbors call me a lesbian and a woman… [in the LGBTQ community] I’ve had people ask me if I am truly non-binary or a trans man because I have short hair and don’t wear makeup or dresses.” 

Suggested reading

The week the trans spell was broken

By Hadley Freeman

Relentless policing of lesbians’ sexual orientation and self-expression run through these stories. One woman compared the LGBTQ community today to her experience growing up in the Mormon religion, “where women are subservient in every way that matters”:

“We are allowed to have no leadership positions without the permission or surveillance of men, even in our own organizations… I was excited to join LGBT spaces and meet people like me. But it wasn’t like that. I left one cult and found out that what awaited me was another. In LGBT and other “progressive” circles, women don’t have the right to assemble without the presence of males who, by nature of being male, have no ability to relate to the experiences of female people. Just like my old religion, you aren’t allowed to question the ideology (in this case transgenderism) without being ostracized… Just like my old religion, men’s feelings and sensibilities must be taken into account in everything that women do.”

Another recalled her evangelical upbringing, writing: “I’d really really like, as a lesbian woman, to no longer be surrounded by transwomen who parrot the same talking points and shame tactics used, nearly word for word, by the youth pastor that tried to help me ‘pull away from sin’,” one woman wrote. “I never thought I would have to defend my sexuality against people in the community”, said another. “I get to feel wrong for how I am and how I love all over again.”

One university student described her brief involvement with the LGBTQ community on campus: “I hoped to meet other same-sex attracted people in the ‘lgbtq+’ club at my new university. It was not a community. There were some gay men and some lesbians, but there were also men who told me to my face that they were lesbians. That I should ‘be open to penis’. That I was a bad person for being a lesbian. I didn’t stay.” Another respondent admitted, “I forced myself to date trans women because I was made to feel like I was a bigot for not being attracted to them as a lesbian. It was incredibly traumatic and I was treated like utter crap.”

Responding to a climate where women who dissent from gender identity ideology face threats of violence, one woman wrote: “I want to talk about the incredible setbacks we’ve made in both women’s rights and same-sex rights without people threatening to beat, rape, or kill me.” 

Suggested reading

Where lesbians live in fear

By Julie Bindel

For women who have firsthand experience identifying as transgender or transitioning — before deciding to desist or detransition — the LGBTQ community reinforces patterns of thinking that caused distress and harm. One detransitioned woman reflected: 

“I spent years running from being a butch lesbian. I transitioned in order to escape the shame & fear I had. When I finally came to terms with the fact that transition had not really helped & I was still the same me I detransitioned… I wanted community more then anything. But there isn’t a place for me anymore. Before I transitioned there were several lesbian groups in my area. They aren’t here anymore. As far as I can tell there is no lesbian space or group anywhere in my area… I can not express how painful it is to not have a place to belong.”

One of the most wrenching submissions was also the simplest and shortest — speaking to something the community at large seems to have forgotten: “there is nothing wrong with women who are only attracted to the female body.” An LGBTQ community in thrall to gender identity and “trans inclusivity” necessarily sacrifices belonging and acceptance for same-sex attracted women.  

For women who want to be part of the LGBTQ community, there’s no escaping gender identity ideology. “The problem with leaving the ‘trans cult’ as a lesbian is that you can never really leave,” one young desisted woman wrote. “The ideology is in every LGBT space, every LGBT charity, every dating site, on the front page of our news sites every single day.” 

In other words, you can accept yourself as a lesbian. You can desist or detransition from a trans identity. You can accept your sex and your sexual orientation. But if you want to stand under that rainbow flag, you’re not allowed to say so.

Back then, heterosexuality looked as easy as falling off a log. They say that onlookers see most of the game, and I found the push and pull of it all, the simple animal processes overlaid by human sophistications, endlessly interesting. I still do.

Today, though, heterosexuals are an endangered species. A recent survey uncovered that 21% of young adults (born between 1997 and 2003) in America identify as “LGBTQ+”. It also reported the frankly incredible stat that the number of self-identifying non-heterosexuals in the American population as a whole has doubled since 2012, from 3.5% to 7.1%.

It is, of course, vanishingly unlikely that a fifth of a population has turned spontaneously away from heterosexuality overnight. The rise of the insubstantial concepts of TQ+, which have little to do with sexual orientation but have been bolted on to LGB for some reason, obviously accounts for some of this. “Queer” is a particularly slippery category; it now seems to include anything from straight chaps wearing eyeliner to straight girls dyeing their hair shocking pink. Thus, it has elevated attendees of a Rocky Horror night or a Depeche Mode concert to the status of a persecuted minority.

But still, the survey finds that 57% of the respondees (of all ages) claiming to be non-hetero say they are bisexual. So, either this was always the case, but people concealed their sexuality due to social stigma. Or — and this is the far more likely scenario, in my opinion — heterosexuals are becoming socially embarrassed by their heterosexuality and trying not to be déclassé.

The reason I believe this is the more likely scenario is that heterosexuality, among the great and the good, now seems more fraught than being bisexual did a decade ago. The grim academic neologism “heteronormativity”, thanks to Tumblr and Twitter, is everywhere. The last few days are representative: Trisha Greenhalgh, a Professor of Primary Care and a member of independent SAGE, exhorting her followers to avoid “preaching heteronormativity”; an Indonesian magazine telling its readers that heteronormativity was the creation of Dutch colonialism; and Dr Nick Gah of Harvard stating that history isn’t called “herstory” because — well, you’ve guessed it. (This will come as a surprise to anybody who knows the Greek word histor meaning witness).

More from this author

The death of British television

By Gareth Roberts

The powerful organs of the LGBTQ+ movement have spent the last decade saying, “let’s end stigma, break taboos, and stop judging”. What this actually means is “let’s move stigma, place taboos around other things, and carry on judging people but for different reasons”.

Who would want to be “normative”, when you can catch a little of the glamour previously hoarded by the gays? A “normative” identity is increasingly seen as ethically dubious in the West; to be socially acceptable, to gain cachet and status, people have to identify as some kind of minority. Race is increasingly rigidly policed and culturally segregated, with white people cast as original sinners because of what they look like. But fear not! Anybody can identify into some spicy high-status oppression at the drop of a rainbow-striped Stetson by claiming to be non-heterosexual, no questions asked.

At the further end of the culture, prominent heterosexuals such as Laurie Penny, Jameela Jamil and Demi Lovato now all claim to be “queer”. Heterosexuality now carries such low status, in their bananas world, that they’ve felt the need to disavow it.

There are further incentives for people to identify as non-hetero in Hollywood, the arbiter of our culture. Take the bizarre new “representation” quota for eligibility at the Oscars — where at least 30% of characters in a film must come from “underrepresented minority groups” or a main storyline must revolve around such groups or it won’t even be considered for an award. It would strike dead most of human culture accrued over millennia, but actors and writers must now obey this peculiar edict or lose their careers.

Suggested reading

The week the trans spell was broken

By Hadley Freeman

It’s all deeply patronising, and borderline homophobic. There is a kind of fetishisation of non-hetero relationships going on here, an element of voyeurism not much different from straight girls who kiss each other at parties to get the boys’ attention. It is also artistically crass. It means that unalloyed heterosexuality can never be depicted, and has a trickle-down effect of making it culturally unacceptable.

It’s no coincidence that all this is happening where #MeToo came to a head — making heterosexuality seem not only embarrassing but frankly dangerous. But Hollywood is also representative of a wider social movement.

Beneficial changes in material conditions in the West have led, paradoxically, to increased angst and the sexes being increasingly wary of each other. So #MeToo plus the atomisation of social life, plus the grim commodification of reproduction and romantic love, plus the problematisation of male sexual desire for women and its expression have made heterosexuals of both sexes neurotic, jumpy and hyper-vigilant. It could be another factor in the so-called Sex Recession among Gen Z; the number of high school students in America having sex has dropped from 54 to 40% since 1991.

Every society has regulations and social standards around heterosexuality, often wildly variant. Ours have changed with dizzying rapidity. One might feel almost nostalgic for something as asinine as “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”. At least that didn’t come laden with drear politics and sweaty-palmed suspicion.

Suggested reading

The emptiness of being queer

By Kathleen Stock

Let me be clear, I’m not blaming heterosexuals for their current predicament; I am blaming the culture that’s increasingly scattering obstacles in their path. When I encounter a functioning straight couple nowadays, I want to cheer.

Because at a very basic level, heterosexuality is of major importance, as the great motor of humanity. Without it, nobody would exist. It is a responsibility and (I’ve observed) a great joy, to rear and to effectively socialise children. The devaluation of parenthood — and of stable heterosexual coupling — across the West has had serious social consequences, exacerbated by bad economic decisions taken by Western governments. It has become increasingly financially difficult to raise kids — the ONS reported in 2020 that the English fertility rate had reached its lowest recorded level — which should be the easiest thing in the world.

It is deeply foolish to ignore or wish away the material reality, and the importance, of heterosexuality, and wrong to judge different kinds of straight relationships entered into by choice. There is nothing wrong with traditional straight couples and nothing wrong with progressive straight couples. They don’t matter more than the rest of us, but they matter in a different and significant way. And they are, let us not forget, the majority.

Shame about innocuous things is dangerous. As a gay man (sorry) who came of age in the Eighties, I know that only too well. It should not be so boring or gauche to be heterosexual that people are desperate to deny it. So let us have more heteronormativity and end the stigma. Take it from a homosexual, you’re just fine as you are.

As a transgender person, I am tempted to agree. When I transitioned eight years ago the goal was to assimilate back into society, and with the minimum of fuss. Occasional stories did reach the press but, while there was passing interest, they were never high up the news agenda.

While the increased visibility cannot be denied, some people are now claiming that transphobia is taking over the nation. In an astonishing opinion piece for the New York Times earlier this week, Juliet Jacques announced that Transphobia is Everywhere in Britain.

Collins Dictionary defines transphobia as “a fear or hatred of transgender people”, so — if Jacques is correct — this is serious. Are there really hordes of people who are either fleeing from me in terror or on a warpath to my door?

I don’t think so. Certainly it is not my experience, nor is it the experience of my transgender friends. I earn a living as a teacher and go about my life much as I always did. Many things can keep me awake at night, but transphobia is not one of them.

More from this author

What Labour gets wrong about transwomen

By Debbie Hayton

While vociferous transgender activists repeat endlessly their demand for “trans rights now”, it’s much less clear what rights we lack. The 2010 Equality Act established gender reassignment as a protected characteristic to defend us against harassment and discrimination. Meanwhile, transphobia is recognised as an aggravating factor in hate crime legislation. We can readily change sex markers on passports, driving licences and other documents. Even the sex recorded on our birth certificates can be amended — or falsified depending on your point of view — if we can demonstrate evidence of need. What more do we want?

Yes, transgender healthcare is buckling under the strain following unprecedented increased demand, and we suffer appalling delays for specialist medical treatment. Scope also remains to further develop additional “third spaces” for trans people, and anyone else who doesn’t want to share with their own sex. However, my fellow citizens do not appear to fear me or hate me because I am transgender.

Some perspective is needed here. Only 12 years ago, a transgender friend was dismissed from her job as an assistant headteacher because she proposed to transition. Her school told her that should she come to work in female attire, she would be escorted straight off the premises. Such outrageous transphobia is no longer permissible or acceptable. Society has been transformed.

So what is this transphobia that Jacques is complaining about? She is not alone; seeking out transphobia in order to moan about it seems to be a key part of transgender activism.

Suggested reading

What Labour gets wrong about transwomen

By Meghan Murphy

On Monday evening, I was at an epicentre of this so-called transphobic hate: a rally hosted by the Labour Women’s Declaration in support of Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance. Those two organisations were recently singled out by the egregious Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) as trans-exclusionist hate groups. Strong words — and a total misrepresentation of reality.

I not only attended that rally — held in a North Kensington social club — I spoke from the platform. Alongside me were those who the LCTR would no doubt condemn as premier league transphobes.

Kiri Tunks, a founder of Woman’s Place UK, reiterated her astonishment at the controversy Woman’s Place has generated. Their campaign to uphold women’s sex-based rights, as enshrined in UK Law, and defend women’s right to be heard, has been twisted out of all recognition in the minds of their opponents. From the LGB Alliance, Bev Jackson described the worst attack on lesbian rights in her lifetime. As sex and gender have been conflated and confused, 40% of people on some lesbian dating sites now have male bodies. She was clear: sex is biology; gender is stereotypes. As a scientist I agree wholeheartedly.

The barrister and former firefighter Lucy Masoud and UnHerd’s Paul Embery called out those leading Labour Party politicians who had signed the LCTR pledges. Masoud described it as “a descent into political lunacy”, but it is an entrenched position in the party. Lachlan Stuart — former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn — explained how doors were closed to him in 2018 when he voiced his concerns about the qualifying criteria for all-women shortlists.

Julie Bindel then let rip. The old-style sexism she had grown up with in the 1970s was preferable to this insidious misogyny dressed up as progress. Transgender ideology, she declared, was men’s rights activism. By now my erasure should have been complete but instead I listened intently as Professor Selina Todd — no platformed recently at Oxford University for alleged transphobery — told the packed hall that not signing the LCTR pledges and silence was not good enough, and if the Labour Party disappeared down a rabbit hole of misogyny then the Labour movement will go forwards without them.

Suggested reading

Don't you dare ask my pronouns

By Julie Bindel

If this was the transphobia that Jacques had in mind, trans people need not be concerned. Trans people in the hall were welcomed warmly and treated with dignity and respect. Trans rights are human rights and they were safe in that meeting.

Unfortunately, the sense of solidarity was not replicated outside the building. Throughout the evening a noisy and intimidating group of protesters repeated their catechism ad nauseum, trans women are real women (spoiler: we are not, we are a different sex) and trans men are real men. But after shrieking about terfs on their turf, they exposed their vacuous ideology and political naivety when they ignited smoke bombs outside the building, just two hundred metres from the shocking sight of Grenfell Tower. As smoke entered the room, the tension and fear was palpable. Memories are still raw in this neighbourhood: it most certainly was not their turf.

When I engaged with the demonstrators after the meeting I was met with fear and animosity. There certainly is transphobia in society — we must not be naïve about that — but it wasn’t found in that meeting, it was outside in the darkness. Maybe the frenzied concern that Britain is being consumed by transphobia is a projection of their inner fears?

The view from the New York Times that “Transphobia is everywhere in Britain” is not just nonsense. It deflects us from the work that we should be focusing on. Trans rights are not secure: we suffer appalling delays for specialist NHS treatment, and we would be foolish to think that bigotry and discrimination were behind us. But we are stronger when we find common cause with other groups that face similar opposition, namely women and LGB people; and from a platform inside a North Kensington social club we made that clear.