Recently, I shared Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Sonnet For The Intro To Critical Theory Professor Who Made Her Negative Feelings About Trans People Perfectly Clear…” The poem captures the cruelties trans people endure when those in power cloak hostility under the guise of reason. I was inspired to share it following a series of conversations I had with a loved one, which compelled me to write the following:
“If the number of teenage girls asking doctors to slice off one of their legs suddenly sky-rocketed,” begins an article shared with me, “...from barely zero to well into the thousands, what would the NHS’s reaction be? Concern about girls’ mental health, surely.”
This was not exactly what I was expecting to read.
The chat I’d had over the phone with my loved one had been about the rise of depression in young girls in the UK. They had been noticing it themselves, but admitted to paraphrasing from an article they had read, the very article I now find myself quoting from.
Its title, “Teenage life is scary — even without gender clinics.”
As I read on, I began to find answers to questions I had about the comments they had been making about the transgender community. These comments were sporadic at first, but as they became more frequent, they also became increasingly graphic.
...
I was reminded that kids are full of fantasies and fever dreams, which we ought to be wary of overindulging. It was stressed that this is a real crisis in England, and doctors looking to make quick cash could do so by capitalizing on the “transgender trend” and “hacking away” at the bodies of confused children.
They added that in Russia, doctors are chopping the heads off of dogs and splicing them onto the bodies of other dogs. “Just because you can do something,” they said, “doesn’t mean you should.”
I don’t doubt that my loved one’s alarm was rooted in concern for the well-being of young people. But the shocking, violent imagery that accompanied this concern – dismembered legs, butchered children, two-headed dogs – I wondered where all this stuff was coming from. Now, I have an idea.
And it must be said, none of this stuff resembles the experience of beginning to transition for a child in the UK. None of it.
In Britain, minors are not offered surgeries of any kind. The reality is closer to paperwork, counseling sessions, and long waiting periods, a far cry from the fevered image of mad doctors and two-headed dogs.
A first appointment at the NHS gender clinic could take over two years to obtain. If and when a youngster reaches a specialist, the first steps are almost always exploratory: talking through feelings, mapping out history, assessing coexisting conditions such as anxiety, depression, or autism.
During that time, patients are enrolled in the care of a team of mental health professionals. Mental health is, in fact, at the core of everyone’s involvement in this process.
Once this team reaches a consensus on treatment, puberty blockers were offered (to 16% of those receiving gender affirming care back in 2019/20) — a medication that has been safely prescribed to children with early advancements in puberty for decades.
These drugs are not an “amputation” as the article asserts; they do not remove anything. Instead, they temporarily delay puberty, granting teenagers and their families time to reflect without the irreversible changes of puberty racing ahead, and may even reduce the need for some surgeries later on.
No responsible clinician suggests that side effects don’t exist; they do. All medical interventions carry some uncertainty, and this was discussed with patients and their parents. Numerous studies have documented minimal side effects, and if prescribed, the social and mental health benefits were determined to outweigh the risks.
If medication stopped, puberty consistent with birth-registered sex would resume. If continued, at 16, the option for cross-sex hormones would then have been an option. Surgery would only become available at 18 years old.
Since April 2024, the NHS has stopped prescriptions of puberty blockers for under-18s, limiting access to those already enrolled in treatment or precious few clinical trials. The ban was made indefinite in December 2024 and only applies to trans youth. Cisgender children and adolescents continue to access them for a broad range of conditions.
These restrictions followed directly from the Cass Review, an independent evaluation of youth gender services launched in 2020. It was led by Hilary Cass, a paediatrician with negligible prior knowledge or clinical experience of trans youth and gender affirming care.
At the time of writing, Cass, who invited input from established anti-trans voices while explicitly excluding trans expertise from the report, is facing legal challenges for failing to release documents to support her findings. The report itself has been rejected by many medical organizations around the world.
When published in 2024, the review also recommended the closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service, then the sole NHS clinic for young people for over thirty years, and replacing it with regional hubs.
Praised by some as a lifeline, Tavistock was not without its criticisms. Being the sole gender clinic for trans youth in the UK meant years-long waits. Former staff alleged the service was overwhelmed, outcomes were not tracked rigorously enough, and concerns raised were ignored by superiors.
While the public saw these issues taken to court and sensationalised by an eager press, reality also offers a picture of a single overstretched clinic, expected to meet a critical national need without the resources to do so.
The closure was poorly implemented. Without establishing the new hubs with adequate capacity, referrals tumbled from hundreds to a few dozen a month, while the wait list surged passed 6,000. Paired with the national halt on puberty blockers, many teenagers have aged out of pediatric services without receiving care. Unless policy changes, many more certainly will.
Prescription of cross-sex hormones has also been effectively halted. Though not formally banned, the NHS has issued no new prescriptions to minors since the Cass Review, citing the need for a “holistic” approach as there is “not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions.”
This is despite the strong evidence that gender‑affirming hormones are lifesaving because they markedly improve mental‑health outcomes. Delays in prescribing puberty blockers and hormones can, in fact, worsen mental health symptoms for trans youth.
The NHS’s “holistic” turn is not rooted in a new scientific consensus, but a political backlash, peddled to the public by a small group of influential figures and championed by a children’s author.
Which brings us to the question: whose fantasies are we indulging here? Are they the feelings of teenagers trying to make sense of themselves? Or the imaginations of adults obsessed with spinning the trans experience into horror stories and encouraging fans to physically attack them in bathrooms?
Journalists, like doctors, are responsible for using their tools with care. Columists understand that the words they use carry their own special weight, and how they are arranged has power.
When a columnist writes about an issue they feel strongly about, flanking their points with violence, they do so intentionally. As Espinoza’s lecturer cloaked their hostility toward her in the language of authority, or a type of reason, Freeman deploys a similar tactic, but the scale of attack differs in a particularly nefarious way. Instead of targeting an individual, the crosshairs are much larger.
While the article presents itself with the concern for girls’ mental health, Freeman’s metaphors don’t land as compassionate pleas for attention to a very real and actionable issue. Instead, she uses images meant to cause alarm. The goal of using them this way is to prime well-meaning readers to associate gender care and trans people with this alarm.
When writers with platforms like The Times weaponize words like this, their reach extends beyond newspapers and chats over the phone. Social and political debate fueled by violent language fuels violent policies, scientific processes are overshadowed, and thousands of young people swept up in the discourse are othered, attacked, and abandoned.
The spectrum of this discourse appears to consist of two sides. One is fairly complex: it’s gender and identity feels threatened; it fears cancellation for expressing uncertainties; a fad is putting children at risk of perversion, or the trans boogie man. The other has its right to exist constantly under threat, while lifesaving care proven to work for them is withheld.
The politics of this sort of incitement produces profoundly harmful results: women stopped in bathrooms and ordered to “prove” their sex; athletes misgendered as trans and subjected to bullying; the International Chess Federation barring trans women from competing, as if they hold some kind of intellectual advantage; and in the UK, recorded transphobic hate crimes have soared, rising more than eightfold since 2013.
The same movement that claims to defend girls makes their daily lives more precarious, subjecting them to further surveillance, harassment, and exclusion. It says that unless you conform to an ideal of femininity, your rights are provisional. It turns every woman into a suspect.
This is the paradox: what masquerades as concern for girls is, in practice, an attack on their autonomy.
My loved one’s feelings have since moved in a different direction. Now that civil protections and access to treatment for the trans community have been rolled back in the UK, they believe “we’ve gone too far.”
For folks like Freeman, Rowling, and Linehan, there’s still so much further to go.
"Sonnet For The Intro To Critical Theory Professor Who Made Her Negative Feelings About Trans People Perfectly Clear At Multiple Points During Every Lecture After I Came Out To Her In That Fucking Gut-Churning 'Please Call Me By My Chosen Name And Not The One On The Roster' Email I'd Have To Send Out To All My Instructors Every Term"
Gil Duran has been covering Curtis Yarvin, The Butterfly Revolution, & the billionaires backing it on his blog here.
Turns out, he’s hit a nerve. Check out Yarvin's feelings toward Duran over on his blog.
If you haven't read anything by him before, fair warning, Yarvin's writing is loaded with meta-modern irony, dogwhistles, & poached lore.
It's a type of double-speak designed to appeal to some, repel others, & ultimately make dangerous statements while covering his tracks.
For example, depending on your familiarity with Yarvin, you may know what he's getting at with all the references to biodiesel he makes when writing about Duran:
¨A ward is any resident who is not capable of earning a living, is not accepted as a dependent by any guardian, and is not wanted...
...As Delegate of San Francisco, what should you do with these people? I think the answer is clear: alternative energy. Since wards are liabilities, there is no business case for retaining them in their present, ambulatory form. Therefore, the most profitable disposition for this dubious form of capital is to convert them into biodiesel..."
This, he says, is a joke. He continues:
"Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma. Perfection cannot be achieved on both these counts, but we can get closer than most might think."
Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century
This is your daily reminder that autocrats thrive on hopelessness. They thrive on fear. They win when the people become resigned and believe that fighting back is impossible.
Listen, there’s simply no denying that we are on the road to autocracy. But, believe it or not, we’re not there yet. (Yes, it’s true!) We can turn back!
But in order to do that, we have to believe we can.
There’s an Eleanor Roosevelt quote that gets repeated so often, it’s almost lost its meaning, but I still think it’s worth revisiting in a new light:
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Don’t give them permission to make you feel lesser! That’s what they want! They want you to just roll over and accept their dominance!
Listen, I know this whole situation is so fucking exhausting. And wouldn’t it be so great if we didn’t have to fight so hard for our basic rights and freedoms? But these are the cards we’ve been dealt; we’re in this fight whether we like it or not.
So, do whatever you need to do to keep yourself sane. We’re in this fight, but we need to take it in shifts or else we’ll get burnt out and then they win.
Keep yourself sane. Find the moments of joy wherever you can. And remember that no one gets to make you feel lesser just because they want you to.
You share your location with the app. Your secure profile includes any military training and equipment—for emergencies only, of course! You may even find yourself linked to a local or neighborhood cell...
There is nothing at all illegal, or even sinister, about any of this...
A notification, without much warning, will tell you to go to such and such a place, and do such and such thing. Of course, your phone will know if you comply—and if you don’t, it will at least ask you for an excuse.”
Trump’s Butterfly Revolution…as conceived by IncelTech nub, CurtisYarvin…I seriously think he watched a little too much WestWorld, and believes the general populace can be chipped with a Musk Brain Implant…
I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the shift in my content.
If your head is in the sand because you need to protect yourself &/or look after your family, holy smokes, please absolutely do that.
My intention is not to push responsibility onto those being impacted as heavily as our immigrant & LGBTQ+ communities in America.
I’m sharing these things because I am a white, straight, cisgender male, & I can’t think of a single good reason for me to stick my head in the sand.
Our siblings beyond borders & binaries are having their rights stripped away.
That's why it is critical to make a fuss, cause a scene, embarrass ourselves, make mistakes, be open to feedback, stay alert, & pay attention to the chorus of dissent.
We might get a few things wrong, but let's give it a go anyway! Your best teacher is your last mistake, after all.
If we really start looking at what's happening we can figure out what to actually do.
(Hey! If I’ve spoken about your community & I’m getting things wrong, or you have any suggestions, you are welcome to do so anonymously. Thanks!)
You might be more than one. You might be different ones at different times. 🫶🏽🫶🏽 you might not be one of these. There are more roles 💪🏽 but this is an amazing intro.
You can’t just like the idea and envision yourself in one of these roles you have to figure out how to be about it ♥️🫶🏽
