1./ On Jolyon Maugham and his underhand tactics. Here's Jolyon complaining that an expert cited by the prosecution in the Tavistock trial is a.... veterinary scientist who did work on sheep. To self-styled genius Jolyon this appears to be an outrage. It isn't. And here's why.
2./ How would YOU test puberty blockers? Now that they're in widespread use Jolyon's side argue it would be unethical to run a trial where a control group of gender dysphoric kids are NOT given PBs. So why not run an animal trial? That's exactly what Professor Neil Evans did.
3./ His team at Glasgow University worked with researchers from Norway's leading Gender Identity clinic. Jolyon didn't mention them. But anyway how CAN animals help us work out the impact of puberty blockers? Simple: all mammals go through adolescence. Yep even sheep.
4./ Strange as it may seem almost identical chemical interactions happen in adolescent sheep as in humans. Yep, pituitary gland, GnRH hormones, sex hormones. Even more importantly, the rewiring of the brain that happens in teen humans happens in sheep too. courses.lumenlearning.com/ap1x94x1/chapt…
5./ How do I know this? Because unlike Jolyon I was intellectually curious enough to speak to the team and read their papers. If like me you grew up in the country you'll know already sheep aren't the pacific little creatures of school rhymes. discoverthelakes.co.uk/how-to-survive…
6./ My boyfriend and I were once chased by rams cos we had our dog (on a leash) and ewes with lambs ain't friendly either. Neither ...despite millenia of domestication are sheep as dumb as we like to imagine. There's another thing that's useful about them.bbc.com/earth/story/20…
7./ If you want to study the impact of a chemical on the entire body mice are so different in body mass from humans it's hard to get the comparison right. Sheep are much closer (average mass 55kg) to humans. So they go thru adolescence and they're close in mass to us! Tick. Tick
8./ The problem is how to examine the mental function of a sheep in ways that might shed light on subtle human brain function. The Glasgow team did something brilliant. They devised a complex maze for their sheep and trained them (using food) to navigate their way through it.
9./ The "teenage" sheep who weren't given puberty blockers when they were reintroduced to the maze after an absence found their way round just as before. Those who took the PBs were lost. This is a very precise sort of memory: spatial memory.
10./ It's the sort of memory that means if you go back to your home town you know you're way around. Could the lack of that sort of memory be suggestive (that's all we can say) of more pervasive identity problems in humans? You can read the paper here. 👇ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
11./ Remember the team were trying to be very precise and only focus on a very few functions. This isn't to say there weren't other deleterious effects of PBs. It just means the experiment was designed to explore THIS one. The team also found distinct emotional differences.
12./ Rams who were given PBs remained more emotionally reactive after the blockers were stopped than the control group. The team concluded "perturbing normal hippocampal formation .. may also have long lasting effects on other brain areas and aspects of cognitive function."
13./ I don't get it. Jolyon and his side say THEY care about kids who believe they are trans. So then why would they not bother to read the paper from, never mind speak to the team who ran the only large animal trial into the powerful drugs they want to give to those kids?
14./ Maybe Jolyon isn't motivated by the truth. Here he points out slyly the team's work was "taken up" by a Christian outfit. So what? Are we to judge Einstein's work on the basis that David Icke sometimes quotes it? This is a lazy attempt to smear good science by association.
15./ Evans was cited by the Christian Institute not paid by them. What's strange is I used to believe some of Jolyon's conspiracy theories. What this debacle proves is that when it comes to facts he can be as careful as a medicalised teenage sheep lost in a long forgotten maze.
1./ Iran's Tran$ Plan. If you want to understand what drives trans ideology look at what's happening in Iran where a new national plan aims to increase revenue from medical tourism six fold; including from the country's booming gender clinics. Why does this matter?
1 of/11.👉
2./ In the West, trans activists and gender clinicians often try to disguise their homophobia. In Iran where homosexuality is punishable by death and trans ideology is officially sanctioned there's no such need. Gender clinics effectively offer to save gays. By mutilating them.
3./ My article reveals this gruesome money-machine is being boosted as Iran aims to make $6Bn a year from medical tourism. A key role will be played by its competing private gender clinics which are among the busiest in the world. Only Thailand does more 'sex change surgery'.
1./ Hezbollah Hypocrisy. It's a scandal a Jewish man was arrested for joking about the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. We should ALL applaud the elimination of this disgusting misogynist and anti-semite. And if you're gay you should especially thank @IDF. Here's why👉
2./ Two years ago Nasrallah called for violence against gays "with no limits". He hated gays so much he urged followers to use slurs rather than the word 'homosexual'. He and Hezbollah's inspiration had long been the rancid bigotry of Ayatollah Khomeini.👇
3./ Hezbollah posters in Beirut often cite the incoherent "thoughts" of this thankfully well dead fruitcake. A major feature of Khomeini's theology was his violent hatred of gays. One of the first laws he passed after he returned to Iran in 1979 was the death sentence for gays.
1./ 🧵The BBC's Transman Shame. In 2004 Sky's reality show There's Something About Miriam encouraged straight men to seduce a trans identified male. 21 years later the BBC has learned nothing as it encourages gay men to seduce a trans identified female. Will it end the same way?👉
2./ Sky was forced to apologise to the men it duped. It also had to pay them £500K for trying to engineer them into having sex with Miriam Rivera a troubled man who believed he was female. The same exploitative arrogance is in evidence today at @bbcthree and @twofourtweets.
3./@bbcthree may have told gay competitors about the trans status of 'Lars' a deluded woman who had her breasts sawn off and took testosterone in a desperate attempt to escape her female reality. But its alleged "honesty" is insufficient because this ignores how reality TV works.
1./ 🧵What does 'Queer' mean? In its new show the Tate claims Leigh Bowery is a queer icon. In my latest article I argue the designer's life and work suggest his kind of pathological narcissism defines Queer. I first met Bowery when I was filmed in a sex scene in his flat. Really.
2./ It was 1984 and I was having a fling with dancer Michael Clark who was being celebrated in a Channel 4 film following his life. He asked me to play a bit of rough trade. Typecast again. We would be filmed in Bowery's flat where he lived with his boyfriend Trojan.
3./ We are told now Bowery's provocative behaviour and wild designs represent an explosion of 'queer' creativity. Yet it's interesting, to say the least, the Tate ignores his casual racism. He called one of his favourite clubbing costumes 'Queer Pakis in Space'. How creative.
1./ 🧵Why was media coverage of the Supreme Court's ruling on sex so biased? My latest article tells the emblematic story of one channel's capture by the trans lobby. Channel 4's subversion is partly down to the social circle its staff move in. Guess who's this guy's best mate.👇
2./ Last week Krishnan Guru-Murthy gave two idiot trans activists the chance to malign the Court's ruling with all the critical challenge we might expect from some blowhard champion of the trans agenda like the SNP's John Nicolson. Funny you should mention that poltroon. 👉
3./ Guru-Murthy and Nicolson regularly describe each other as their closest friends. Nicolson says GM is "one of the people in the world who likes me most." A low bar. They met when Guru-Murthy was a 15 year old schoolboy during filming for a TV show Nicolson was presenting.
1./ Apologies. It’s welcome that
Mark Smith has said, “men like me need to say sorry”. Everyone makes mistakes. A democratic culture only works if we accept people’s views evolve. There are tho some lessons to be learned from Mark’s original stance. 👉 heraldscotland.com/politics/viewp…
2./ In his column in early 2020 after the launch of @AllianceLGB, Mark opined on our “horrible website”. He complained images of women had been deliberately chosen to look as feminine as possible to emphasise trans male exclusion. Uh? 👀 They really weren’t. Worse was to come. 👉
3./ Smith went on to compare @AllianceLGB’s concern over child safeguarding to Section 28. “Dangerous to children is a phrase that appears on the LGB Alliance website along with multiple uses of the word ‘threat’. We have been here before.” Indeed we have. Heard of PIE anyone?