I was delighted to see @andrewstickland's Mars Alone trilogy praised in the New Statesman. They're superb books that haven't found the audience they deserve. But also, Andrew was the target of attempted sabotage by trans activists. The reason may make you gasp 1/ The trilogy, written for young adult readers, is what's known as 'hard' sci-fi – not because it's difficult to read (quite the contrary) but because it obeys the laws of physics. There's no teleportation, travel beyond the speed of light or encounters with aliens 2/

In the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood operated a blacklist, refusing to employ people with 'wrong' political opinions, whether or not those opinions had any impact on their work. Scores of careers were destroyed. The blacklist is now widely acknowledged to have been a bad thing. 1/ In 2024, Scotland's largest literary network launched a blacklist, instructing bookshops not to sell books if they were written by authors with 'wrong' political opinions. Many lives and careers have already been damaged by this persecution. 2/
archive.ph/xe8Pw

🧵Thank you to Andrew Anthony of the Observer for holding @jonronson to account over his disgracefully partial documentary about Camp Trans. Ronson refuses to update the programme (which would be easy to do), nor has he replied to any of the criticism, until now. Ronson's justification for not mentioning the murder of two lesbian Michfest participants and their son by a Camp Trans protestor is twofold: that Dana Rivers hadn't gone to trial by the time the programme went out, and that Michfest and Camp Trans weren't mentioned in court

🤏🧵After lesbian Brenda Rees took hormones and had surgery so she could present herself to the world as a man called Mark, she was distressed to find she couldn't marry a woman or train for the priesthood, because the law still considered her female She resolved to challenge this law and in the 1980s took the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights for failing to recognise her male status. Her action was unsuccessful but it paved the way for the Gender Recognition Act 2004.

🧵 The Cass Review is 388 pages long. Deciding it's TL;DR is not unreasonable. We all rely on trusted people to read long documents for us and then summarise the key conclusions. This particularly applies to people in public life, and especially politicians. There are 650 MPs. Expecting them all to read a 388-page report, on just one of the very many subjects they're meant to know about, isn't realistic. It wouldn't be a sensible use of resources.

In May 2019 Ruth Hunt, who had just resigned as CEO of Stonewall, did a Q&A at the Oxford Union. Asked for tips on how to argue with people who didn't agree with Stonewall on trans issues, she said: 'Those who think transwomen are men? I wouldn't even bother. Leave them to us.' If that sounds faintly menacing, consider this: a few months later, the @AllianceLGB held its inaugural meeting, at a secret location. None of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people attending believed Hunt's mantra that transwomen were women.

The latest lie from the Vichy gays rewriting our history to suit a modern narrative (and secure their rainbow jobs) is that 'gay' in the early 70s actually meant all the people who now try to crowd under the alphabet umbrella. It's true that some people did make this claim in those days. Rachel Pollack, a leading member of the small TS/TV group that bolted itself onto the Gay Liberation Front, claimed: 'A transsexual or transvestite is gay because she or he is transsexual or transvestite'

🧵One of the proudest moments in my career as a journalist was when – pre-internet – I tracked down Peter Wildeblood, the father of gay activism. He was jailed for homosexuality in 1954 and his book Against the Law helped convince the Wolfenden Commission to recommend law reform

He emigrated to Canada in the 70s to pursue a TV career and retired to British Columbia, where he kept himself to himself. When I found him - via his friend Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and another friend in Morocco – a terrible stroke had left him quadriplegic and unable to speak

Anatomy of a captured broadcaster:

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🧵On yesterday's events at Tory conference:
According to a whistleblowing gay clinician at the Tavistock, the overwhelming majority of adolescents who think they are trans are same-sex attracted or bisexual. That clinician said this is gay conversion therapy in plain sight Influential gay men such as Andrew Boff, the chair of the London Assembly, deny that any such thing is taking place, because they don't think it sounds likely (just as Owen Jones openly laughs at the idea of homophobic parents transing their kids, because he can't imagine it)

🧵 No one in their right mind claims all gender activists or all trans-identifying people are paedophiles. That's a vile notion and it's not remotely true.

However we DO claim that the gender movement's sacred status makes it great cover for all kinds of seriously dodgy stuff. Take the person now known as Stephanie Hayden, a self-styled lawyer with a police force at his beck and call, boasting about his remorseless legal campaigns against anyone who crossed him, and most vengeful of all to anyone who dared reveal his previous male identity or name(s)

Who's this talking to Keir Starmer at a recent cosy breakfast with rainbow bigwigs? Don't recognise him? I'll help you out: it's Steve Wardlaw, chair of the LGBT-focused insurance company Emerald Life, and advisory board member of @THTorguk, the UK's largest sexual health charity Steve is in the news this morning for issuing a grovelling apology to @BluskyeAllison. Do read it. Steve's willingness to casually defame the black lesbian barrister whom Stonewall tried to destroy for wrongthink speaks volumes about him

‘I didn’t need to be lied to. I needed to be given therapy to help me work through my issues, not affirmed in my delusion that transforming into a boy would solve all my problems’ Criminally, MPs of all parties are campaigning to make such therapy ILLEGAL
You read that right. At 12, @ChoooCole was confused and upset by an early puberty and decided life would be easier if she were a boy. Doctors told her parents she would kill herself unless she was given puberty blockers and cross sex hormones and have her breasts removed

The real scandal about Kate Osborne, the Labour MP who condemned the Home Secretary for daring to recommend a bestselling book by @HJoyceGender, is that Osborne isn't just any backbencher. She is a member of the Women and Equalities Select Committee That committee's job is to hold the government to account on equality law and policy, including the Equality Act 2010. Helen's book Trans remains the most authoritative work on the challenges posed to that law by gender ideology

Please take your seats for the announcement of the shortlist for the second annual Viner Award, the prize for the company or institution that has done most to undermine its brand by pandering to gender ideology in the Holy Month of Pride™ This was a year of extraordinary entries, with charities, corporations and public bodies vying to beclown themselves in pursuit of rainbrownie points. Our judges had a hard job to choose between them but we have now agreed a list of four, for which you the public may now vote

Once upon a time, a clever but unscrupulous lobby group had a brilliant idea: instead of trying to change a law it didn't like, which would be time-consuming and expensive, it would simply pretend the law had changed already. It knew that most people don't read laws... So all it needed to do was offer to explain the legislation to anyone who needed to implement it, and then explain the law as it wanted it to be, instead of as it actually was. Because the lobby group was very influential, this worked a treat

In February last year BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme centred on MichFest, a now defunct women-only festival. The programme was structured around a sympathetic interview with the founder of Camp Trans, which was set up to picket the festival. bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00… The programme didn't mention that in 2016, just after MichFest was forced to close, two lesbian participants and their son were murdered by a Camp Trans protestor. It clearly didn't think that was relevant to a story about women who felt unsafe letting men into their space.

I haven’t been near a Pride march for a long time but when I used to go, there was always some counter-protest, someone wearing a billboard saying we were all going to hell. Did we beat the shit out of them? NO WE DIDN’T. That never occurred to anyone. We mainly just laughed. Also if several hundred or thousand people had tried to kick the shit out of one solitary protestor, I would have expected the police to defend that protestor and those committing violent assault to be arrested. Because that’s a reasonable way for the world to work.

The question future generations will ask is why a large cohort of gay men in the media, politics and the charity sector dismissed these warnings from gay clinicians, deciding they knew better, and abusing anyone who disagreed. It’s a staggering betrayal. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… In newsrooms, people will have discussed this question, and some senior gay journalist will have said, ‘no mate, this never happens, and I know this because I’m gay’, and the story goes away. Owen Jones made a video laughing his head off at the very idea this happens.

Reminder to anyone who needs it today: if you say cancellation is just accountability, and one of the main engines of that cancellation has been a tsunami of death and rape threats, you don’t get to stand aside from the ugly parts and claim they’re nothing to do with you

https://twitter.com/Joannechocolat/status/1580839623097393152

Just to be clear, because Joanne has written her tweet with her usual careful deniability: she's referring to a public attack launched on @jk_rowling last night by Billy Bragg. For anyone who has followed the back and forth, it's very clear she's taking Billy's side.

A week since Breslow broke, still nada in the Guardian. Since then the Lottery and Children in Need have suspended funding for Mermaids and the NHS has cut ties, but the paper that dismisses fears about a terrible experiment on children as ‘culture wars’ hasn’t reported any of it

https://twitter.com/simonjedge/status/1577678094353170435

That’s the real culture war: brush this major story under the carpet because it doesn’t suit your tribal allegiance. But sorry, a paper that has promoted this garbage to a generation of readers has a duty to start undoing some of the damage, whether those readers like it or not