I Kissed a Girl launched on BBC Three in 2024, the UK’s first dating show built entirely around lesbian and bisexual women, running alongside its sibling, I Kissed a Boy. Both got axed in March, before series two of the girls’ show had even aired. Budget, apparently. The final series went out in June 2026, two episodes at a time, and let me say they came out VERY quietly, on Tuesday nights. Where was the promo? It felt like it was over before it even started.

The cast haven’t shut up about it, and good on them. One contestant told Metro exactly what it is: “You cannot cancel lesbians.” Another said that it was weird how little publicity there was, and that going quiet on marketing is a pretty convenient way to guarantee the low ratings you then use as your excuse. And I have seen that move before, in a dozen other corners of media and charity work. Starve something of resources, then point at the outcome as proof nobody wanted it in the first place.

And I’ll be honest about where I’m coming from in all of this. I’m queer, and I grew up with absolutely nothing like this. What I had was Love Island. That was it; that was the whole picture of what a relationship was meant to look like, beamed into my living room every summer, and I genuinely thought that was the ceiling. Recoupling, villa drama, some lad “exploring his connection” with two women at once, and everyone treating that as the peak of romance. I didn’t have a single thing on telly that told me two girls fumbling through a first date could be that same kind of story worth watching, worth rooting for, worth a slow-mo shot and a cheesy voiceover. So watching I Kissed a Girl exist, even briefly, even messily, did something to me that I don’t think I can fully explain to someone who always had the other version. It’s not merely representation as a nice idea. It’s the difference between growing up thinking love looks one way, or knowing it doesn’t.

I’ll be fair and try to give the BBC some grace. The BBC didn’t stand up and explicitly say queer relationships aren’t worth primetime. The line is budget, and I do believe that’s a part of it; broadcasters are genuinely skint right now, and plenty of shows are getting axed that have nothing to do with sexuality. BUT, to cancel the ONLY dating show based on queerness feels like a bit of a kick in the teeth.

But I say this to sixth formers all the time when we’re talking about bias: what someone means and what actually happens aren’t the same conversation. Nobody at the BBC had to think “queer love isn’t worth investing in” for that to be the practical result of a hundred small decisions: who gets the weekend flagship slot, who gets a trailer campaign, who gets renewed on buzz alone versus who gets killed before the numbers even land. Nobody at ITV sat down and decided straight dating shows matter more either. They just kept greenlighting them, season after season, while the one show centring queer women got two runs, a low-key streaming slot, and an ending before its own cast had finished filming. (Don’t even get me started on the fact that there is no reunion). Love Island gets a nightly slot and its face on every bus stop. Love Is Blind gets a Netflix push and endless reunion specials. Straight relationships get to be wallpaper; they get to be comfortable, endlessly renewable. Queer relationships get one show, one channel, and a “no current plans to return.”

Here’s why I can’t file this under “shame about a telly show” and move on. In the workshops I run, I’m working against a backdrop most kids can’t even name. Years of screen time have taught them a grammar for what relationships look like, who leans in first, who gets the season-long will-they-won’t-they that the whole country roots for. That grammar is straight, mostly, because that’s what gets funded and scheduled.

So when I’m standing in front of a class trying to talk about consent, or what a healthy relationship actually feels like, or how gender shapes who gets believed, I’m not starting from a blank slate. I’m working against years of kids only ever seeing one template held up as normal. This show chipped away at that, and no, it wasn’t perfect; it was still messy, but at least it showed young people queer relationships do exist. But because, for once, a queer teenager could watch two girls fumble through a first date and a first kiss and a bit of jealousy, and see it treated with the same weight as any straight couple on Love Island. That matters for the queer kids in the room. It also matters for the straight kids quietly absorbing that this, too, is just what relationships can look like.

Cancel that after two series, with barely a trailer to its name, and you don’t lose a show. You lose one of the only counterweights on the whole schedule.

I’m not going to stand in a classroom and tell a class the BBC hates queer people. That would be one bold move. But representation doesn’t survive on good intentions. Someone will need to fund it, schedule it, and market it as intended; otherwise it will wither. And the fact that it withers first, fastest, and quietest tells you something about where it sits in the pecking order, whatever’s written on the press release.

Maybe that’s what I’ll bring into the room next. Not “here’s a show that got cancelled.” Notice what gets a primetime slot and a billboard without anyone questioning it, and notice what has to prove itself twice over for half the airtime. It’s the same pattern that shows up in whose experiences get believed, whose relationships get taken seriously. I Kissed a Girl was a small, imperfect crack in that pattern. I’d rather we kept widening it

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Gender reveal parties have exploded in popularity over the last decade. I’ve lost count of how many variations I’ve seen at this point: cakes with coloured sponges, balloons filled with confetti, smoke bombs, glitter cannons, and even (I wish I were joking) boxes of butterflies. All to build suspense and announce what? Pink or blue. One of two possibilities. One of two acceptable outcomes. A binary dressed up in sugar and spectacle.

But here’s the thing: they’re not revealing gender. What they are actually ‘revealing’, in a very public, dramatic, and often expensive way, is sex. These are sex reveal parties, if we’re being honest. What’s really happening is that a group of adults gather to announce what kind of genitals a baby has symbolically. “Let’s pop a balloon to find out if this baby has a penis or a vagina,” and, when you think of it like that, it becomes, well, a little… weird. A little uncomfortable. And maybe that discomfort is a clue that something deeper is going on here.

Sex and gender are often used interchangeably in our culture, but they are not the same thing, not linguistically, not socially, not biologically. Sex typically refers to a person’s biological characteristics, including chromosomes, hormones, and internal and external reproductive organs, and is usually categorised as male or female. But even that binary is more of a simplification than a truth. Intersex people, for example, are born with physical sex characteristics that don’t fit typical definitions of male or female. This isn’t rare: experts estimate that as many as 1.7% of people are born intersex, roughly the same proportion of the population as people with red hair (ref). And yet, intersex bodies are often ignored or “corrected” to fit within a binary system that doesn’t accommodate them.

Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct. It refers to the roles, expectations, expressions, and identities that societies assign to people, often based on assumptions about their sex. While sex is about bodies (and even then, it’s complex), gender is about meaning. It’s about the stories we tell about what those bodies mean, how they should behave, what they should like, who they should become.

And these stories aren’t fixed; they’re shaped by culture, context, history, and power.

We like to think that our modern ideas of gender are somehow universal or natural. Then the world was made gender existed, and it has always been this way. But that’s just not true. In many cultures, past and present, gender has never been rigidly binary. In ancient Jewish texts, there are references to six different genders, including androgynos (someone with both male and female sexual characteristics) and tumtum (a person whose sex is ambiguous or indeterminate). In Indigenous North American communities, the concept of Two-Spirit people recognises that some individuals embody both masculine and feminine spirits, and they are often held in high regard. In South Asia, hijras, a community of people who may be intersex, transgender, or non-binary, have existed for thousands of years and hold a distinct cultural and spiritual role. However, they also face significant marginalisation today. These are a few examples that remind us: gender has always been diverse and more than a binary. It’s colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy that flattened it into a rigid binary and called it “natural.”

So when we have “gender reveal” parties, what we’re really doing is projecting a fixed narrative onto a baby before they’ve even had a chance to become a person. We’re saying, “This baby has a penis, therefore they are a boy, therefore they will be masculine, like football, be strong, and one day probably date women.” Or, “This baby has a vagina, therefore she is a girl, therefore she will love pink, be sweet and gentle, and one day become a mother.” That’s a whole lot of assumptions to make off the back of an ultrasound scan. This is not to say that everyone who has a gender reveal party is a bad person or that gender makes them bad; instead, it allows us to reflect on where we learn about gender stereotypes and what this means for us as we grow.

We know that these gender stereotypes exist. What makes these assumptions so powerful is that they don’t stop at the party. Once that pink or blue balloon pops, a whole wider system of gendered socialisation begins. From clothes to toys, books to birthday cards, language to lullabies, everything around a child begins to reinforce the idea that their identity, interests, and even emotions should follow a prescribed pattern. It’s not only that girls are given pink and boys are given blue. It’s that boys are told to be tough, to take up space, to avoid anything “feminine” like it’s contagious. And girls are told to be sweet, to stay small, to be pretty, polite, and accommodating. Gender reveal parties themselves are not bad; it is the social messages that we receive about our gender that are worth reflecting on.

So here is a question I want to ask you:
When was the first time you were taught your gender?
Not when someone told you what gender you were- that often happens before we’re even born- but when you first felt the expectations that came with it. When did it become clear that the world saw you a certain way because of it?

I tried to think of a single “aha” moment, like the dramatic realisation, “oh, I’m a girl,” but I couldn’t find just one. What I found instead were layers of moments. A string of tiny experiences that, together, taught me what being “a girl” meant in the eyes of the world.

I remember being six years old, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in class, when a teacher came in and asked for “four strong boys” to help her carry something. I looked around at the boys standing up and remembered thinking, “I’m strong too.” But I didn’t say anything because it was already implied that strength wasn’t for me. That I was not strong.

When I was ten, I was told I couldn’t play a game at lunch because “it’s a boys’ game.” I didn’t even like the game that much, but it wasn’t about that. It was about the invisible line I hadn’t realised I’d crossed. The way something as small as a playground game could suddenly become a reminder of these invisible rules.

At fifteen, it was a teacher again, telling the girls in class we needed to make sure our skirts were longer, because we were “distracting the boys.” We had to buy skirts from the school as part of the uniform policy, and I had to buy a skirt 3 sizes too big so it would be considered “long enough” and acceptable, which meant wearing safety pins in it every day to keep it from falling off completely. I was wearing the school-approved uniform and still somehow being told that my body was the problem. That I was responsible not only for how I dressed, but for how others responded to it. That was gender, too.

These moments weren’t dramatic on their own. No one sat me down and explained what it meant to be a girl. But over time, the messages accumulated, trickling into my perception of the world and of myself without me even noticing. They came from school, from family, from adverts and toys, from clothes shops and Christmas gifts and casual comments that seemed harmless at the time. And this is the thing: we aren’t exclusively assigned a gender at birth; we are socialised into it. Every interaction, every assumption, every label on a onesie or character on a lunchbox is part of this culture. Go to most major supermarket chains or clothing stores and walk down the baby clothing aisle. You’ll see it everywhere: onesies that say “Mummy’s little princess” in a soft script font for girls, and “Daddy’s brave soldier” in blocky blue letters for boys. Before they can even speak, children are being taught that being a girl means being cute and cared for, and being a boy means being courageous and in control.

When I work in schools and talk to young people about gender, they can list stereotype after stereotype without hesitation: boys like football, girls like makeup. Boys are messy, girls are organised. Boys are good at maths, girls are better at English. They rattle them off like song lyrics they’ve heard a thousand times, because they have. They’ve been soaking in these messages since birth. One of my favourite questions to ask young people is to think of gender stereotypes they wish were acceptable for their gender. Here are a few of my favourites.

”I would put the man into manicure,” 13-year-old boy

”To be able to order an iced pumpkin spiced latte and not feel judged,” 15-year-old boy

”To carry an umbrella”, 16-year-old boy

“I just wanna play drums in the school band, but it’s all boys, and they don’t take me seriously.” 11-year-old girl

“To like Taylor Swift and not get rinsed for it.” 12-year-old boy

“To hug my guy friends without everyone saying ‘no homo’.” 13-year-old boy

Let me be very clear, liking dresses or enjoying football isn’t the issue. None of these things is inherently bad. A girl loving pink isn’t the problem. Pink is absolutely one of my favourite colours! A boy wanting to climb a tree isn’t the problem. The problem is that we teach children there’s only one right way to be a boy or a girl, and that deviating from it is shameful or wrong. When toys, clothes, activities, and even emotions are gendered, we send the message that their choices are limited, that their identities should conform and be boxed in, not expanded.

This has real consequences. Gender stereotypes shape everything from how children behave in the classroom to how they express (or suppress) their emotions. Research has shown that by age 6, girls are already less likely to believe they can be “really, really smart” than boys. (ref). Boys, meanwhile, are less likely to seek help or show vulnerability, because they’ve been taught that doing so is weak or “girly.” These messages don’t only hurt individuals; they reinforce inequality across society.

Because when we box children into narrow gender roles, we’re not just limiting their potential; we’re laying the groundwork for bigger inequalities later on. Gender pay gaps, underrepresentation of women and marginalised genders in leadership, gender-based violence, and toxic masculinity- all of these are rooted in the early lessons we teach about what it means to be a boy or a girl.

The campaign “Let Toys Be Toys” has done incredible work in calling out how retailers and manufacturers market toys along gendered lines, reinforcing the idea that imagination, adventure, science, and building are for boys, and beauty, care, and domesticity are for girls. They’ve shown that when children are given more freedom to play without limits, they learn more, grow more, and feel more confident being themselves.

So when we talk about a gender reveal party, it’s never just a party. It’s an example of a starting gun. It’s the moment a whole set of expectations, rules, and pressures begins to crystallise around a child who hasn’t even taken their first breath. A child who, before they’ve opened their eyes, has already been placed into a box labelled pink or blue. We need to ask: who benefits from this binary? Who gets left out? And what might it look like to let children grow into themselves, rather than shaping them to fit our ideas? Gender inequality doesn’t start with the wage gap or political representation. It starts here, in balloons and bunting, in pink cupcakes and blue smoke. It starts with what we celebrate, what we assume, and what we teach our children about who they are allowed to be.

And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can still celebrate. We can still gather our people and make a fuss about a new life coming into the world, but why does it have to be based on genitals?

Imagine a star sign reveal party instead. Now that could be fun. Instead of slicing a cake to discover pink or blue, what if we were guessing whether this baby would be a fiery little Aries or a gentle Pisces? Will they come into the world with Capricorn ambition or Libra balance? I’m not saying astrology is the answer to the world’s problem… but it’s playful, it’s symbolic, and it leaves room for personality, mystery, and becoming. No one is going to restrict a child’s toy options or career aspirations based on their rising sign (I mean, I hope not). A Scorpio baby reveal doesn’t come with the same baggage of who you are, how you must behave, or what the world expects of you. And yes, the baby might arrive early or late, which technically shifts their star sign, but nothing is perfect. At least astrology gives a bit more flexibility: it’s socially acceptable to laugh about being on the cusp, to change your mind about what traits fit you, or to blame Mercury in retrograde for your bad day. That’s a far cry from the rigid pink-or-blue boxes that stick with you for life.

Because that’s the issue, right? These parties don’t simply announce a sex. They announce a life path. Blue means trucks and toughness. Pink means bows and emotional labour. And before that baby even takes their first breath, the world begins to narrow around them what they’re allowed to like, how they’re expected to move. Who they’ll be encouraged to become.

So what if we swapped it for something a little more open? A star sign reveal might not be scientifically solid, but at least it’s not limiting. It invites imagination, not rules. It’s about possibility, not prescription.

And that’s the thing: the celebration isn’t the problem. The baby isn’t the problem. The problem is the narrative, the idea that gender is fixed at birth and should determine a person’s entire life experience. We can keep the party going. We need to change the meaning, and in my opinion, a star sign reveal party or just a party celebrating the baby is much more interesting anyway.

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So when we had sex education in Year 8, and everything we were taught was about men and women, boyfriends and girlfriends, pregnancy, and abstinence, it did not feel shocking. It just felt like… that’s how things are. Looking back, this felt completely normal. There was nothing in me going, “hang on, where am I in this?” because I hadn’t been given the language, or the expectation, that I should be included.

I knew I was gay from a really young age, but I also carried this quiet hope that it might just go away. That one day things would click into place, and I’d fit into the version of relationships everyone kept talking about. That I’d stop feeling slightly out of step with everything around me.

Plot spoiler: it didn’t. And I’m so, so glad it didn’t.

But what I did not realise at the time was how much those early experiences began to shape me. When no one talks about people like you, it feels like a quiet kind of rejection, like being edited out before you’ve even had a chance to exist on the page.

And you learn you have to start editing yourself, filtering what you say or laughing along when things feel slightly off. You learn, very quickly, how to make yourself fit into conversations that weren’t built with you in mind.

And sex education was one of those spaces.

Now, years later, I spend much of my time returning to classrooms to deliver relationship and sex education workshops with Split Banana. I walk into rooms full of young people, often around the same age I was then, and I’m very aware that there will be young people sitting there who feel like I did. Who are quietly translating everything in their heads and wondering if any of this applies to them.

And the difference that small changes make is honestly huge.

Sometimes it’s as simple as the language we use. Saying “partner” instead of assuming gender. Talking about different types of relationships as a normal part of the conversation, not as a separate, awkward add-on. Including examples that reflect different identities without making it a whole “moment.”

It’s not always loud. It’s not like everyone suddenly gets up and cheers or reacts, but more of a softening within a room, this kind of sense of recognition. Sometimes a student will come up afterwards and ask a question they clearly haven’t felt able to ask before. And sometimes, if I’m honest, you can tell when it’s the first time they’ve heard themselves included like that.

Sex education is about so much more than just biology or risk or “don’t have sex.” At its best, it’s about helping young people understand themselves and each other. It’s about giving them the tools to build relationships that are safe, respectful, and actually feel good to be in.

But if LGBTQ+ young people aren’t included in that properly, they’re left to figure it out alone.

And they do figure it out, of course, they do. But often through trial and error, through Googling things late at night, through piecing together information that isn’t always accurate or healthy or relevant. And underneath that is often the question of whether their experiences are even valid enough to talk about.

That has a huge impact! On everything from confidence to safety to what you think is normal, or acceptable, or something you have to put up with.

I think there’s still this misconception that inclusive sex education is somehow “extra” or “advanced” or something that might confuse people. But honestly, what’s confusing is being taught something that clearly doesn’t fit your life, and being expected to… adapt it.

What is confusing is silence.

What is really confusing is never hearing your reality acknowledged, and having to decide whether that means it’s not important, or not appropriate, or not allowed.

And what I’ve learned from being on the other side of the classroom now is that young people are far more ready for these conversations than we sometimes give them credit for. They’re already navigating identity, relationships, boundaries, social media, expectations, all of that, and so much more. Inclusive sex ed is not introducing complexity into their lives; it helps them make sense of the complexity that’s already there.

I think a lot about what it would have meant for me to sit in a classroom and hear something different. Just small shifts.

• A teacher saying, “This applies no matter who you’re attracted to.”

• An example that wasn’t automatically heterosexual.

And no, it would not have solved everything. But it would have made things feel less lonely.

Pride Month always brings visibility, celebration, and community, and that matters so much. But it also makes me think about all the spaces where that visibility still hasn’t fully reached. Classrooms are one of them. Because for many young people, Pride isn’t something they feel yet. Not fully. They might still be in that earlier stage, the stage of questioning, the uncertainty, the quiet knowing without the language for it.

And the way we teach sex education can either support them through that, or make it harder. It can either say, “You are part of this conversation,” or leave them to work that out on their own.

Every time I go into a school now, I carry that with me. Not in a heavy way, but in a really grounded, practical one. In the choices I make about language, examples, what I include, and what I don’t assume. And those choices add up.

They shape whether a young person feels seen. Whether they feel able to ask a question. Whether they leave that room with more clarity or more confusion.

It does not come down to big abstract debates, but real young people, sitting in real classrooms, trying to understand themselves and the world around them.

They’re already there, and they always have been!

The question is whether we meet them where they are.

This Pride Month, I’m thinking about that 15-year-old version of me and all the young people sitting in classrooms right now, having their own version of that experience. And I’m hoping that, slowly, through all the small shifts, the quiet changes, the more honest conversations, we’re building something better for them.

Something where they don’t have to feel edited out before they’ve even had a chance to exist.

Something where they don’t have to grow up thinking they’re something they’ll eventually grow out of.

Just something where they’re included. From the start.

That was a few years ago.

Now, those words are coming up more often in the work I do. Red pill. Black pill. Chad. Stacy. They are sometimes dropped quite casually into everyday conversation. Of course, not everyone understands these words, and language is constantly changing and evolving.

And “Chad” is just one of these; in fact, there is a whole hidden vocabulary of words that young people in particular are using.

Once you start listening for this type of language, you realise it’s not just a few random terms. It’s a whole vocabulary. And it is useful to understand what these words mean and where they come from.

So what are these:

• A Chad is the guy who has everything: confident, attractive, and effortlessly successful with women.

• A Stacy is his counterpart, the idealised, hyper-attractive girl who, in this worldview, only wants someone like him.

If you’re not that? You are positioned somewhere lower down. You are often seen as invisible. Maybe overlooked. Maybe, in their words, a “beta.”

Then there’s the idea of being “red-pilled”, waking up to what’s framed as the “truth” about how the world works. Usually, the belief is that women hold the power in dating and that society is somehow stacked against men.

If the red pill is about waking up, the black pill takes it a step further. It’s the belief that none of it can be changed anyway, that your looks, your status, your chances at relationships are basically fixed.

There are other words too.

“Becky” is used to describe a girl seen as less attractive than a Stacy, often with uncomfortable class or racial undertones.
“Looksmaxxing”, trying to improve your appearance to increase your chances, sometimes in really intense or critical ways.
“Soy boy”, an insult aimed at men who are seen as too emotional, too progressive, not “masculine enough.”

Each word on its own might not seem like much.

But together, they have built and become part of an entire system.

When words start to shape how you see the world

These words have been used relatively sparingly in workshops, but every so often, I hear something like the following

“A Chad gets the girls. ”

And what often strikes me is not the language itself; it is how settled it sounds.

Often, it does not sound like they are sharing an opinion but a fact.

That is exactly what this vocabulary does. It simplifies things.

It can turn complicated, messy human experiences of attraction, rejection, and connection into something that feels fixed. Predictable. Almost scientific.

You are either in one category or another.

And society loves to structure people into binaries. And with this, you either “win” or you don’t.

The young people are trying to make sense of where they fit

A lot of the young people and boys I work with are trying to figure out where they fit into all of this.

They don’t necessarily recognise themselves in the version of masculinity they think they’re being measured against. The confident one. The one who always knows what to say. The one who seems to move easily through relationships.

And when they don’t see themselves there, they start looking for explanations.

The manosphere offers one.

It tells them:

• There’s a reason you feel like this

• There’s a structure behind it

• And once you understand it, things will make more sense

That kind of clarity can feel reassuring.

Even if the explanation itself is quite unforgiving.

I’ve had young people explain the red pill idea to me like they’re clearing something up.

Like they’re cutting through confusion.

I remember one student saying:

“It’s not even sexist, it’s just realistic.”

And that stayed with me, because it didn’t feel like anger. It felt like belief.

And belief, especially when it’s backed up by a whole online ecosystem repeating the same messages, is hard to shift.

When we talk about these spaces, it is easy to focus on the language or the more extreme ideas that come out of them.

But underneath all of that, there is always a reason for all of this. And I will never fully understand this, and it is so different for each person that it is not possible to write about it as a monolith when it is so individual. But some of those feelings are:

Feeling rejected.
Feeling invisible.
Feeling like you’re getting something wrong without knowing what it is.

The problem isn’t that young people are trying to make sense of those feelings.

The problem is the framework they’re being offered to do it.

Because instead of leaving room for growth, or complexity, or change, it often tells them that everything is already decided.

A world reduced to categories

What I notice most is how quickly everything becomes a label.

People aren’t just people. They’re types.

Chad.
Stacy.
Beta.
Becky.

And once you start seeing the world like that, it’s hard not to start placing yourself somewhere within it.

To start asking: where do I fall?

And more importantly: what if I’m not where I’m supposed to be?

What we offer matters instead

I don’t think the answer is to mock this language or dismiss it.

Because for a lot of young people, it’s helping them name something real, even if the explanation isn’t helpful.

But we can offer something more honest.

We can make space for conversations about rejection and insecurity that don’t turn into fixed labels.
We can challenge the idea that attraction and relationships are as rigid as these frameworks suggest.
We can remind young people that people aren’t categories, and neither are they.

I still think about that first moment, standing in a room where everyone else seemed to understand something I didn’t.

At the time, it felt small.

But it wasn’t.

It was an early glimpse into a language that’s quietly shaping how some young people see themselves, and each other.

And if we don’t take the time to understand that language, not just the words, but what they’re doing, then we risk missing the conversation that’s already happening right in front of us.

I want to start by being really upfront before delving deeper into some of the content of this article. I am a white woman talking about gender inequality, gender-based violence, and sex education for a living. I walk into schools, I make content, I say the things that many people would rather remain unsaid, and I do all of it from a position of significant privilege. I know that, and it has to be something I reflect on consistently; I think it matters to name it out loud rather than quietly footnote it and move on.

Because this work is not neutral, neither is it comfortable. And it does not come without a cost.

The First Time Hate Finds You

In 2021, a handful of my blogs and videos went slightly viral. It wasn’t necessarily a huge, enormous million-plus hit kind of viral, but it was enough to escape my usual audience and start doing the rounds in corners of the internet I hadn’t anticipated. And that was the first time I really understood what it means to be a woman with opinions on the internet.

The hate comments arrived like a fanfare, and at first, they hurt. I’d be lying if I said they didn’t. There is something that cuts right through you when you have poured genuine thought and care into something, something about keeping young people safer, about giving them language for their experiences, and the response from some corners is pure, contemptuous cruelty.

It stings, but I think it is very much supposed to.

When I first felt that sting, I thought I should stop, just in case it became worse, but I know for me it means the work is hitting where it needs to. Over time, you build a kind of armour. Not the kind that makes you cold or disconnected from this work, you don’t want that, because warmth is part of what makes the work effective, but the kind that lets you read a hateful comment, feel it very briefly, and then carry on.

When You Post About the Manosphere, Brace Yourself

There is one specific type of content that requires extra preparation before I hit publish. Every single time.

When I talk about the manosphere, that sprawling, radicalising online ecosystem of incel forums, misogynistic influencers, and communities built around resentment of women and feminism, I know what is coming. I know that content will find its way there. It will be a screenshot and shared with commentary designed to mock, dismiss, or intimidate. I will be called things I won’t repeat here. My credibility will be questioned in the most personal terms possible.

I have made peace with that. Because waiting for a world where it doesn’t happen before speaking would mean never speaking at all.

And here is the thing that I genuinely cannot get over: the replies almost always prove my point.

I’ll post something about how certain online spaces are radicalising young men, or about how misogyny is being packaged and sold as self-improvement, and the response from those communities is so precisely, almost poetically, illustrative of exactly what I was describing that I couldn’t have written it better myself. The way disagreement curdles instantly into threats and personal attacks. It is, in its own grim way, the most convincing evidence I have.

I’m not trying to change every mind. I never was and I never will. Some people are not ready to hear this, and that’s okay. But I am always, always speaking to the person on the edges, the young person watching who hasn’t yet decided what they think, the parent who is starting to notice something shifting in their teenager. Those are the people I’m talking to. And no amount of hate comments changes that.

I Can Leave. Not Everyone Can.

Here’s where I have to be honest with myself, and with you.

When I walk into a school, and I’m met with hostility, a classroom full of eye-rolls, a student parroting something they clearly absorbed from male influencers, a moment where the atmosphere turns brittle and resistant, I have learned to handle it. And then I can leave. I get on the train, I walk home, and I decompress. I have that exit.

When the comments get too much, I can close the laptop. Step outside. Walk away from it in a physical, real way.

I choose to do work that puts me in uncomfortable spaces. I choose to engage with difficult attitudes and harder conversations. That choice, the fact that it is a choice, the fact that I can unchoose it on any given day, is its own enormous privilege that I try never to forget.

And it is also a fraction of what Black women are doing in the same line of work.

Black women who speak about gender justice, who write, educate, make content, and take up space online face a level of targeted harassment that is in a different category entirely from what I experience.

The volume is higher. The threats are more violent. The racism and misogyny combine into something that has its own name, misogynoir1, and it is relentless in a way that I, as a white woman, am simply not subjected to in the same way. The expectation that they represent an entire community, that they must be unimpeachable at all times, that they must educate and absorb anger and keep showing up, all while fighting battles I don’t have to fight, is a weight I will never fully understand from the inside.

They do not always get to close the laptop. The harassment follows. Into their mentions, into their DMs, into spaces that were supposed to feel safe. And they are frequently doing this work with less institutional support, less media amplification, and less of the subtle social protection that comes, whether we like it or not, with being white.

I’m not saying this to position myself as a good person. I’m saying it because if I am going to stand in front of young people and talk about systemic inequality, I had better be willing to look it squarely in the face when it shows up in my own field. In my own community. Around people doing the same work I do.

Why I Keep Going Anyway

This work is worth it. I believe that without any reservation.

Not because every session goes brilliantly, but because there are always challenges. Not because every comment is kind or every student is receptive. Not because the internet is a warm and welcoming place for women who talk about things men would sometimes rather they didn’t.

But because I have sat with young people who, by the end of a session, are articulating something they didn’t have words for before. I have had messages from people who said that something I wrote helped them understand what had happened to them. Or when I have watched a student come in dismissive and leave thoughtful, which I know a lot of people would argue is not a transformation, and they may be right, but it is a start.

That is what I’m here for. Not to go viral, though honestly, if this helps more people find the work, great, and not to be universally liked, which was never going to be on the cards anyway.

I’m here because this conversation is necessary. Young people deserve adults who are willing to have the conversation, and because the discomfort I feel in doing this work is nothing, nothing, compared to the discomfort of staying silent.

So I keep going. I prepare myself, I take a breath, and I keep going.

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Because it’s not enough to stare and point at the manosphere and say, “This is dangerous.” It is. But that’s only part of the story. The harder, more uncomfortable question is why so many boys and young men are ending up there in the first place, and what happens if we don’t meet them before it does.

There’s a tendency, when we hear views that feel misogynistic or extreme, to jump straight into correction and shut it down. To make it clear that it’s wrong. And sometimes that instinct comes from a good place; it matters that harmful ideas are challenged. But if that’s the only response boys hear, it often has the opposite effect. When they hear this, they don’t feel guided; they simply feel dismissed and told they are “wrong.” And when people feel dismissed, they look for spaces where they won’t be.

That’s part of what makes the manosphere so powerful. It listens, at least on the surface. It takes feelings like rejection, confusion, loneliness, and anger, and gives them a simple explanation. It tells boys that their pain makes sense. That someone else is to blame. That there’s a clear way to take control again.

If we want to interrupt that, we have to offer something better, not just louder.

That starts with listening, but not in a passive way. It means being genuinely curious about what’s underneath what a boy is saying. Not reacting to the words, but trying to understand the feeling behind them. Because often, when a boy says something that sounds harsh or unfair, there’s something else sitting underneath it, feeling invisible, not good enough, unsure where he fits.

If we skip past that and go straight to telling him he’s wrong, we lose him.

But listening doesn’t mean leaving things unchallenged either. It’s a balance that’s hard to get right. Boys need spaces where they can say the wrong thing and not be immediately shut down, but also where those ideas aren’t left to sit unexamined. The difference is how that challenge shows up. It’s not about winning an argument. Discussions rather than debates. It’s about opening something up. Gently questioning. Offering another way of seeing things. Letting them arrive somewhere, rather than dragging them there.

A big part of this is trust. Without it, no conversation really goes anywhere. And right now, a lot of boys don’t feel like these conversations are for them. They feel like they’re being spoken about, or blamed, rather than included. So when we talk about gender inequality only as something men do to women, some boys switch off before we’ve even begun.

But the truth is more complicated than that. Gender inequality does harm women and girls in profound, systemic ways, but it also shapes the lives of boys in ways we don’t always acknowledge. It teaches them to hide vulnerability. It ties their worth to success, status, and control. It leaves very little room for uncertainty, softness, or still figuring things out.

If we can bring boys into that conversation, not as the problem, but as people also navigating these pressures, it changes the tone completely. It becomes something we’re trying to understand together, rather than something being done to them.

And that matters, because the “us vs them” narrative is exactly what the manosphere feeds on. The idea that men and women are in opposition, that one must lose for the other to gain. But none of this exists in isolation. The expectations placed on men and the inequalities faced by women are part of the same system. You can’t untangle one without looking at the other.

So what does this actually look like in real life?

It’s one thing to talk about listening and trust in theory. It’s another to sit across from a teenage boy, your student, your son, your younger brother, and hear something that makes your heart sink.

In those moments, it’s easy to panic. But often, what matters most is staying steady.

For teachers, it can start in small, everyday ways. Creating classrooms where discussion is normal, where disagreement isn’t immediately shut down but worked through. Not every comment needs a public takedown. Sometimes I find that actually it’s a quiet follow-up conversation after class: “I was interested in what you said earlier, can you tell me a bit more about what you meant?” That kind of approach invites reflection, rather than defensiveness, and you end up having some really insightful conversations led by curiosity rather than punishment.

It also means widening the curriculum where possible, bringing in conversations about relationships, identity, and media literacy. Helping students question what they see online, rather than absorb it uncritically. I have run workshops with Split Banana on critical thinking about digital harms, and it truly makes a massive difference for young people. These are not done in a way that feels like a lecture, but as something we are figuring out together.

For parents, the challenge is often even closer to home. These conversations don’t usually happen in one big, meaningful sit-down. They happen in fragments, in the car, over dinner, in passing comments about something seen online.

What matters is making those moments feel safe enough to be honest.

That might mean resisting the urge to react immediately. Letting a comment land, asking a question instead of shutting it down. It might mean admitting that we don’t have all the answers, but we are willing to figure it out together. It might mean sharing our own experience, what we were taught about being a man or a woman, and how that’s changed.

And sometimes, it’s about what isn’t said directly. The way adults model relationships, handle conflict, and talk about other people, boys are absorbing it all.

Across both home and school, one thing becomes clear: boys don’t need perfection from the adults around them. They need consistency. They need to know that even if they say the wrong thing, the conversation isn’t over.

Because the reality is, if we only show up when something goes wrong, we’re already too late.

Where this leaves us

Inside the Manosphere shows us where some boys are ending up. But it doesn’t have to be the only path available to them.

If we want something to change, the focus can’t just be on pulling apart harmful spaces. It has to be about building better ones at home, in schools, and in everyday conversations.

Spaces where boys feel heard and challenged. Where they can question things without being shut down. Where they are encouraged to think more deeply, not just react more loudly.

Because if those spaces don’t exist, the manosphere will keep filling the gap.

And it already is.

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I spent last Tuesday in a Year 9 classroom in South London. Thirty-two teenagers and I are trying to have an honest conversation about what it means to be a man in 2026.

Halfway through, a boy at the back, a sweet kid, quiet most of the year according to his teacher, said, completely matter-of-factly: “Miss, men are supposed to suffer. That’s just how it is.”

He was fourteen.

I didn’t shout him down. I didn’t pull out a statistic. I just paused and said, “Where did you hear that?” And he looked genuinely confused by the question, as if the idea had always been there, fully formed, like it had grown inside him organically rather than been planted by someone with a ring light and a monetisation strategy.

That moment has stayed with me all week, including while I was watching Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere. And look, I like Louis Theroux. I think most people with a television and a functioning heart do not mind Louis Theroux. His particular brand of gentle, bemused, slightly-disappointed-dad energy is genuinely one of the most memorable brands in British documentary-making. There is nobody better at standing in a room full of bravado and simply raising an eyebrow until something cracks.

But I finished the film feeling genuinely frustrated. Not necessarily at the men on screen, though yes, obviously, also at the men on screen, but at the shape of the film itself. At what it chose to look at, and what it quietly but obviously looked away from.

Here is the thing about the manosphere that I’ve learned from spending years in classrooms: it is not a mystery. It is not some dark digital labyrinth that requires a documentary filmmaker to spelunk into on our behalf. It is a very straightforward product, sold to a very specific audience, that exploits something real to sell something false.

The something real is this: a lot of young men are lonely, confused, and searching for meaning in a world that has changed faster than the scripts we hand them. That is not a right-wing talking point. That is just true. The boys I meet in schools are navigating enormous pressures, academic, social, economic, and emotional, with very few tools and even fewer trusted adults willing to sit in the mess of it with them.

The false something the manosphere hands them instead of tools: a villain. A clear, satisfying explanation for everything that feels hard. You’re not struggling because life is complex. You’re struggling because of women, because feminism, because the establishment, because of tap water, yes, apparently, tap water is now involved (watch the documentary, and you will understand), is conspiring to hold you back.

It’s genius, in the most cynical possible sense. Take a genuine wound and point it in the wrong direction.

Theroux is good at exposing the cynicism of the men at the top. There’s a startling moment where one of his subjects essentially admits, on camera, that he has chosen an immoral path in pursuit of clicks, says it. Out loud. The brazenness of it would be funny if it weren’t so grim.

And Theroux does what Theroux does: he responds to the bravado with a sort of weary, undramatic decency. He scoffs at the pantomime displays of machismo. At one point, he says, “Come on,” like a man who has found a teenager smoking behind a shed and cannot be bothered to make it a whole thing.

But, and this is a significant but, there is a fundamental tension at the heart of this kind of documentary that I don’t think the film ever quite confronts. These men are not harmed by attention. They are powered by it. Outrage is their fuel. Notoriety is their business model. One of the subjects, having initially suspected a hit job, ends up pulling Theroux into his own livestreams, broadcasting him to his followers, turning the whole encounter into content for his own gain. “I’m not your content,” Theroux protests.

But he absolutely is. The horse has not just bolted; it’s gone and won the Grand National, been given a trophy, and is now doing a victory lap around the internet.

Now, do not misunderstand my point, I’m not saying don’t make the documentary. I’m saying: who are we making it for, and what are we hoping happens next?

For me, the film’s most powerful moments have nothing to do with the influencers. They come when Theroux meets the followers. The audience. The boys who have found these men and decided, for reasons that are both entirely understandable and entirely heartbreaking, that this is the map they’re going to use to navigate the world.

One young man has lost his brother to suicide. He sits across from Theroux and earnestly explains that depression isn’t real, that men are meant to endure, that suffering is simply the correct masculine condition. He has swallowed the ideology whole, and you can see in his eyes that it has given him something, a framework, a sense of solidarity, a reason for the unbearable thing that happened to his family. And I watched that, and I thought: this is the room I’m in every week.

Because that is what I see in schools. Not these big cartoon villains who seem so far out of reach. It is boys who are hurting, who have been handed a story that makes the hurt feel purposeful, and who are now carrying that story into their relationships, their friendships, their sense of what women are for and what they themselves deserve.

You cannot shame those boys out of that story. Believe me, people have tried. Mockery doesn’t work. Outrage doesn’t work. What works, slowly, imperfectly, in a draughty classroom on a Tuesday afternoon, is being genuinely curious about them, asking questions, and sitting with the discomfort together without rushing to a conclusion.

What kind of man do you actually want to be? Not what are you supposed to be? What do you want?

That question, in my experience, often produces a long silence. And the silence is where the real work happens.

Here’s what the documentary largely skips over, and what I think has to be part of the story: the girls.

Not because women should always be the focus, we’re absolutely not short of that pressure, but because the impact of this ideology on the girls sitting next to these boys is immediate, daily, and largely invisible on screen.

I’m in schools where girls have stopped putting their hands up in certain classes because the social cost has become too high. Where teenage girls are quietly adjusting their personalities, shrinking themselves, laughing along with jokes that make them want to cry, because they have learnt, faster than any documentary has caught up with, that a boy who has been told women are the enemy will make your life very difficult if you don’t manage him very carefully.

Where are those girls in this film? There are a handful of scenes with the influencers’ partners, and they are pretty telling. One woman looks so visibly uncomfortable during a conversation about her boyfriend’s approach to fidelity that I wanted to reach through the screen, but they stay on the periphery. The actual young women most affected by what is being fomented here barely appear.

And I think that absence matters. Because you cannot fully understand this movement without understanding what it does to the exact people it targets. The UN estimates that 137 women and girls are killed by a partner or family member somewhere in the world every single day. I don’t raise that figure to sadden anyone reading this, though it is devastating. I raise it because the line between what boys are being taught online and what women experience offline is not as long as we’d like to think. A documentary that spends most of its time in Marbella interviewing men about their brand is not drawing that line clearly enough.

I’ve been doing this work for years. I’ve sat in hundreds of classrooms. I’ve had the conversation go brilliantly, a boy who came in hostile and left thoughtful, a girl who said it was the first time she’d ever been asked what she actually thought about any of this. I’ve had it go badly, walked out of a room once, professionally, not dramatically, after it became clear that the school had not adequately briefed the parents, and I was about to become someone’s culture war moment.

I’ve learned that young people are not a lost cause. Not even close. The boys who are most deeply into this stuff are often the ones who, given a safe space and a non-combative adult, are most desperate actually to talk about it. The ideology fills a vacuum. My job is to make the vacuum smaller.

What I have also learned, slightly more cynically, is that the adults have been slower to reckon with this than the children. Teachers know something is wrong, but don’t have the language. Parents are baffled and frightened. Policymakers are several steps behind. And documentary makers, bless them, are still largely treating this as a fascinating subculture to observe from a respectful distance, rather than a crisis that is already inside every secondary school in the country.

So… A modest proposal.

What if the next documentary about the manosphere wasn’t presented by someone who goes to Marbella to interview the figureheads, but by someone who goes to Croydon, Coventry, and Clihtero, and sits in the rooms where the actual damage is being done and undone?

What if a woman presented it?

Not because women have all the answers. Not to score a representational point. But because, and I say this with complete seriousness, I genuinely think we would find something different. The conversations I have in schools are different because of who I am. I get access to a kind of honesty that I don’t think a male presenter gets, not because I’m better, but because I’m unexpected. Boys don’t know how to perform for me in the way they perform for a camera held by someone who looks like the audience they’re used to playing to.

I think there is a documentary to be made from inside classrooms. From the girls who are doing the exhausting invisible labour of navigating this every day. From the boys who are lonely and confused and not beyond reach. From the teachers who are trying to hold the line with no training, no budget and thirty-two kids.

I think that documentary would be more useful, more honest, and frankly more interesting than ninety minutes in a villa with men who have already decided exactly what they want the camera to see.

And I think it should be done by a woman who already has access, relationships, and receipts.

(Hello, producers. I am right here).

This isn't a problem the internet created, and a documentary will fix it. It's a human problem, which means it needs humans, in rooms, in conversation, doing the slow, unglamorous work of actually showing up. That's less exciting than a Netflix commission, I know. But it's what works.

I deliver workshops on gender, masculinity, and online culture in secondary schools across the UK. If you’d like to bring these conversations to your school, or if you’re a producer with a commission and good taste, get in touch.

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I spend a lot of my life in rooms with young people. In school assemblies, where we’re talking about consent and power. In workshops where we unpack the language boys use about girls, and the way girls learn to shrink themselves to stay safe. In circles where someone says, very quietly, “I’ve never told anyone this before, but...”

I also spend a lot of time in rooms with adults, in campaign meetings, policy discussions, and strategy sessions, where we talk about systems. About patriarchy, institutions and prevention.

And what I know, from both, is this:

Someone affected is always in the room.

So when the Epstein files resurfaced recently, the story flooded every platform, became a dinner-table debate, and was used for political point-scoring. I don’t just see it as a news cycle. I remember the echo of every disclosure I’ve ever held.

Because while the rest of the world argues, someone who has lived through sexual violence is listening very carefully.

They are not listening for your analysis.
They are not listening for your ‘hot take’.
They are listening for whether you are safe.

We talk about “one in three women” and “one in six men” as if they are statistics we can hold at arm’s length. But we often forget we are looking into the eyes of those numbers. I have sat with teenagers who were abused before they had the vocabulary to name it. I have worked with young people who thought what happened to them “didn’t count” because no one used the word rape. These numbers have names. They have school uniforms, bus passes, and group chats. They grow up and become your colleagues. Your partners. Your friends.

And when stories like this dominate the news, they are watching.

They are watching who you defend first.

They are noticing whether you say his name with fascination, as if proximity to power is inherently interesting, and her name with suspicion. They are noticing whether you frame it as a salacious scandal or as what it actually is: the visible tip of a system that consumes girls and protects men.

Because that’s what this is. Not an anomaly. Not a one-off monster. A system.

I’ve spent years working at the intersection of gender inequality and violence. I’ve seen how early the foundations are laid, in the jokes we excuse, in the entitlement we normalise, in the way we teach boys that status shields them and girls that credibility must be earned.

The Epstein case isn’t just about one man. It’s about networks of wealth, masculinity, and institutional loyalty. It’s about how power closes ranks. How the reputations of men are guarded so much more fiercely than the bodies of girls and women and marginalised genders. And survivors know that instinctively.

They know how quickly conversations pivot to protecting “careers” and “legacies.”
They know how often the first question is not what happened to her? but what will this do to him?

Every time a story like this breaks, survivors are being taught what it costs to speak. We teach them through the questions we ask.
Why didn’t she say something sooner?
Why did she go back?

I’ve facilitated workshops where we unpack those exact questions. I’ve watched young people realise, in real time, that those questions are not neutral. They are loaded with disbelief. They assume rationality in situations defined by fear, coercion and grooming. And they flatten trauma into timelines.

To someone hearing this who has lived it, those questions don’t feel curious. They feel like you are judging them, courtroom and all. They feel like a door quietly closing.

So people carry it instead.

They carry it into adulthood. Into workplaces. Into relationships. Into campaign meetings about safeguarding. Into rooms where people dissect the details of a dead man’s empire while they sit there holding their own story in their chest.

I think about the young people I’ve worked with, the ones who tested the waters before disclosing. The ones who would casually mention a news story about abuse and watch my reaction before deciding whether to trust me with theirs.

Adults do that too. We just like to pretend we don’t.

Someone you love has probably tested you already.

Maybe they brought up a headline and watched whether you rolled your eyes.
Maybe they listened for whether you joked.
Or they noticed if you immediately questioned the victim’s/surivivors choices.

We have memorised the names of powerful men. We debate them, analyse them, centre them. Meanwhile, the women, the girls, the people who have gone through this violence are reduced to a category. To “victims.” To a footnote.

What we centre tells survivors everything about whose pain matters. This is not content. It is not entertainment. It is not a cultural Rorschach test for your politics.

These were real girls. Real young women. Whose bodies were commodified. Who were repeatedly failed by systems meant to protect them. This isn’t something that happened just back then; those systems still exist. When we focus on the spectacle over the structure, we miss the point. When we obsess over the intrigue of powerful men rather than the conditions that allowed them to operate, we teach survivors that their suffering is secondary to the drama of male downfall.

I’ve seen how language shapes what people believe is possible. How a single response can either widen a crack of trust or seal it tightly shut.

So before you say the next thing about any of this, pause.

If the person you love most had survived something they’ve never told you about, and they were sitting beside you right now, would your words make them feel safer?

Would they feel believed?

Would they feel like you understand that violence like this is not an anomaly but an outcome of unchecked power, gender based violence and entrenched misogyny?

Or would they quietly decide that you are not the person to tell?

Because here is the truth I have learned from years of this work and campaigning: survivors are always scanning the room.

Not for agreement.
Not for someone to have perfect politics.
For safety.

They are listening to whether you minimise.
For whether you centre men’s reputations.
Whether you turn trauma into trivia.

They have been listening their whole lives.

Be the person whose words widen that door.

Who doesn’t ask “why didn’t she say something?” but “what made it unsafe to speak?”

Who understands that this isn’t about gossip, it’s about power, gender, systems, and the everyday conditions that allow abuse to flourish.

Someone you love survived something they have never told you about.

And right now, in the middle of all this noise, they are not looking for your opinion.

They are looking for a reason to believe you would hold their story with care.

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If you have read something in this blog that affects you, please do reach out. I have listed some providers below.

• 24/7 Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Line (Rape Crisis England and Wales) 0808 500 2222

• The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC)

0808 801 0331 napac.org.uk support@napac.org.uk

Supports adult survivors of any form of childhood abuse. Offers a helpline and email support.

• Refuge

0808 2000 247 (National Domestic Abuse Helpline) refuge.org.uk

Support, information and advocacy. For women and children who’ve experienced domestic violence and abuse.

• Men’s Advice Line

0808 801 0327

mensadviceline.org.uk

Confidential advice and support for men who’ve experienced domestic violence and abuse by a current or ex-partner, or family member.

• The Survivors Trust

0808 8010 818 (helpline for people aged 16+) 07860 022 956 (text) thesurvivorstrust.org

Helpline and lists of local specialist services for survivors of sexual violence. Includes advocates and Independent Sexual Violence Advisors (ISVAs).

I hated it. Absolutely hated it.

I went to a Catholic school. My sex education was as basic as it could get: a few awkward diagrams, a lot of “don’t do this,” and pretty much zero nuance. Queer people? Not one word. Desire? Nope. Pleasure? Absolutely not. Periods were whispered about like a terrible secret in biology wrapped in words like “sanitary" Sex was something that would “happen later,” that is, if you were lucky enough to survive adolescence unscathed. Shame was pretty much part and parcel of the curriculum.

And now… here I am. Doing this as a job. Standing in classrooms week after week, talking about the very things I wanted to hide from. It is laughable sometimes, but it also seems like the perfect place to end up.

Awkwardness is not the enemy

Yes, young people find sex education awkward. Very awkward. Students laugh, groan, and dare each other to say words out loud that they don’t feel like they “should,” say, pretty much have heard it all. Occasionally, someone asks a question that makes the room freeze or just burst into hysterics.

You might think that this awkwardness is a failure, that I have done a bad job, and that the lesson is completely falling apart. But in contrast, it’s often the start of something very real. That discomfort is the important point where things begin to change; we can move past the awkwardness: it’s where curiosity, reflection, and learning collide.

I remember one session on periods when a student whispered to the person next to them, “I didn’t know that periods were not really dirty,” and the whole room went quiet. Instead of laughter, another young person said, “I thought period blood was full of bacteria that can make you sick,” and there was a series of nods. There are so many myths in the sex education world, and there is power in naming. That’s the moment when learning happens.

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, wrote about education as a practice of freedom, turning passive recipients into critical participants. Sex education is one of the clearest examples of this: when students realise they can ask questions without being judged and when curiosity is validated rather than shamed.

Queer inclusion isn’t optional

One of the most powerful parts of my work comes from queer-inclusive education. For many students, it’s the first time their identities, desires, or experiences are named and treated as valid. Often, we see representation treated as symbolic, mentioned in passing, but it is so important to understand that it’s protective. For Queer students to know that they are not broken, invisible, or “wrong,” I can only imagine the difference it would have made if someone had told me that a decade ago.

I’ll never forget one student who, after a session about pleasure, and we spoke about Queerness they lingered behind, “I’ve never heard it called that before. It’s… nice to know I’m not alone.” They didn’t even realise the impact of those words on their sense of self. There is such power in creating small moments of recognition, relief, and validation.

Young people are desperate for honesty:

• “Is this normal?”

• “Why does my body do this?”

• “Is it okay to feel this way?”

• “How do I say no without hurting someone?”

• “Why does what I see online feel so different from my life?”

Inclusive sex education equips students to navigate not just sex, but relationships, consent, pleasure, and so much more. And seeing queer identities normalised is one of the most liberating things you can do in a classroom, for those students, it can literally feel like a lifeline.

It’s not really about sex

Here’s the thing I’ve realised over the years: sex education isn’t really about sex. It’s about power. It’s about who controls their body, whose knowledge counts, and whose experiences are allowed to exist.

When young people lack the language to talk about their bodies, their consent, or their relationships, shame then comes rushing in to fill those gaps. When we normalise secrecy and misinformation, we leave them less able to recognise it when it happens.

That’s why it is so important to weave theory and reflection into my sessions, without making them feel like a lecture. Feminist pedagogy teaches us that knowledge is never neutral. Teaching about consent, boundaries, and desire is itself political, and that politics matters for students’ safety, self-esteem, and how they navigate the world.

Young people have taught me so much, and continue to come up with such brilliant ideas, questions and answers. Last year, I asked a class, “How do you know if something is consensual?” and one student said, with absolute certainty: “If it feels good for both people?” It wasn’t the answer on the next slide on the PowerPoint, but it was true! And that’s the whole point: giving young people the space to think, reflect, and find their own language.

I do this work because I hated it

I don’t stand in front of classrooms despite my teenage self’s absolute discomfort; I do it because of how uncomfortable I felt. I remember being that awkward, confused, slightly panicked kid, convinced everyone else had some secret manual for navigating their body and relationships that I’d missed entirely. I remember wishing someone would just tell me the truth, without judgment, without shame, without the subtext that something was inherently wrong with me or that I would never fall in love because I did not understand what was being put in front of me.

Being a sex educator means holding space for laughter and seriousness at the same time. In fact, I encourage laughter in my sessions because I know it breaks down barriers and allows people to feel. It means answering questions honestly without pretending to have all the answers and continuously learning along the way. It means trusting young people to think critically and to wrestle with complexity. It ultimately means showing up, day after day, because every time a student realises they can ask, say no, or exist as they are, it’s a reminder that this work matters. It matters so much.

Sex education is rarely neat or comfortable, but I know and have seen that it is transformative. And sometimes, what once felt like my worst nightmare has become my most meaningful work.

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She told me about one girl who had stopped coming into school. An image of her was being shared among her peers. But this wasn’t any image; it was an image that wasn’t real; it had been generated using AI. But this distinction didn’t seem to matter to anyone; the photo was shared with, and, as with many things, the image spread quickly. The reactions from her peers were immediate, and despite her having nothing to do with the image creation, she was the one who got landed with the consequences.

I heard about this conversation, but it seems to be happening more and more, which shows how quickly it is spreading. The technology itself wasn’t what necessarily shocked me, as we know this sort of thing exists, but it was how quickly the situation became normalised. People talked about it as an “online issue”. Something that had happened on the internet, rather than to a real person, the people in her life spoke of it as unfortunate but distant, something that would eventually blow over.

But, it didn’t pass; these things don’t “blow over.” It reshaped her daily life, where she felt safe, and who she trusted, whether she felt able to be seen at all, and, of course, meant she felt like she could no longer go to school, the very place young people are meant to feel safe and grow and learn. This is what often gets lost in conversations about AI harm: the human impact arrives long before the policy language does.

A lot of public discussion still frames AI-related harm as theoretical. A risk that we have to think about in the future. A problem we’ll need to manage once the technology becomes more advanced, more widespread, and more serious.

But for women, girls and marginalised genders, that future has already arrived. And these patterns aren’t new. When we begin to unpack them, we see they’re painfully familiar.

Shame. Humiliation. Control. Power.

The same dynamics that underpin so much of gender-based violence are now being reproduced through new tools, and these are faster, wider-spread and often with even less accountability attached. Images can be created in seconds. Content can spread instantly. And yet responses from platforms, schools, or institutions are often slow, fragmented, or sometimes completely non-existent.

What I notice again and again is how carefully we avoid naming this as violence. Instead, we reach for softer language. We talk about “misuse of technology”. About “online safety”. About “bad actors” or “unintended consequences”. These phrases create distance; they make it feel like it is something that happens “over there.” They make the harm feel accidental, technical, or even inevitable.

But when an image, whether it be revenge porn or false AI images of girls, is used to intimidate, humiliate, or silence someone, that isn’t a glitch. It’s violence. It sits on the same continuum as the forms of abuse we already recognise, just mediated through a different system.

And as with so many other forms of gendered harm, responsibility is quietly shifted onto those experiencing it. Women, girls and marginalised genders are told to be more careful. To lock down their accounts. To think twice before sharing images. To manage their visibility.

The tools, meanwhile, continue to develop at a pace that laws cannot keep up with. This mirrors the patterns we’ve seen for decades: new forms of harm emerge, and instead of interrogating the systems that enable them, we ask individuals, often those already most at risk, to adapt. O

What worries me is how easily gendered harm slips through gaps when it isn’t explicitly named. If violence against women and girls is treated as a niche concern, or an unfortunate case, a “bad apple,” it rarely shapes design decisions, platform policies, or regulation in any meaningful way. It gets added later, if at all.

By that point, the damage has already been done.

None of this is about rejecting technology outright. But to centre the lived realities of those most affected, rather than abstract promises or worst-case hypotheticals.

If we are serious about accountability in the age of AI, then men’s violence against women and girls cannot be something we retrofit into conversations after harm has occurred, that is much too late, and we know that laws do not protect the most marginalised. It needs to be part of how we define risk, responsibility, and safety from the outset.

I don’t think we yet have all the answers for what meaningful accountability looks like here. But I do know that continuing to soften the language only serves to obscure the reality. This is not a ‘future’ problem. It’s already happening. And real people are living with the consequences.

If we want to respond with care, we have to start by naming it properly, online violence is violence.

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What it did give me was clarity. Often uncomfortable and sometimes slow. It came in the moments you notice patterns repeating, particularly in facilitation and training work, the exact phrases being excused, the same minor harms being brushed aside, the same people being expected to cope while the system stays the same. Watching that happen over and over makes you realise: normal isn’t neutral. Normal is a choice that we make.

So instead of a tidy roundup, here’s what I’m choosing to carry with me into 2026, and what I’m leaving behind.

IN for 2026

Naming harm plainly
This year reminded me that we spend so much time softening words to make them ‘easier’ to hear: “incident”, “miscommunication”, “poor judgment”. These words protect institutions that have harmed, not people. Calling misogyny misogyny, racism racism, or harassment harassment isn’t confrontation; it’s accurate. And when language carries such a weight in our world, accuracy is revolutionary.

Slow, relational work
I’ve learned again how crucial slow work is. The conversations that don’t make a soundbite. The trust that’s built over months of work. The tiny shifts in how a young person talks about themselves or calls out something that feels unfair. That work doesn’t photograph well, doesn’t make reports shine, but it changes lives quietly, and that’s enough. It is in those quiet, so-called ‘invisible’ moments that don’t make a front cover but do make a difference.

Young people as analysts of power
Too often, adults talk about young people as “future leaders” or “voices to be platformed”. This year reminded me that young people are already thinking deeply about inequality. Seeing patterns, calling out double standards, and questioning systems in ways we sometimes miss. Treating them as thinkers, not projects, changes both how we engage with them and the outputs we can create.

Feminist thinking in technology, from the start
Designing AI or digital tools without consulting the people who’ll be most affected is careless. Having led a research project for a feminist charity earlier this year, I saw how urgent it is to embed feminist, anti-racist, and justice-led thinking at the very beginning, not as a patch once harm has already occurred.

Language as intervention
Words shape our reality. Having done hundreds of workshops in schools, I have seen how casual jokes, dismissive comments, or “banter” set the tone for what feels acceptable. Calling these in or asking why, staying curious isn't harsh, it’s prevention. Every time someone hears a comment challenged, it expands what they see as possible in how to treat others.

Collective care
I’ve also been thinking a lot about care, not personal resilience, not heroism. But collective care that is specifically built into systems, into teams, timelines, and budgets. I have been part of a beautiful community organising group and seen the power that care holds.

Staying with discomfort
Real growth rarely feels tidy or comforting. The most meaningful learning I witnessed this year often looked awkward, defensive, or unsure. And that’s okay. Discomfort isn’t failure; it’s the work. I have been learning to better sit with the discomfort I feel doing some of this work and where defensiveness may come from, and staying curious about what this means.

OUT for 2026

“It’s not that deep”
A phrase I’ve heard too often this year. It usually is that deep. Minimising harm protects the comfort of some while others bear the cost. If it feels deep, it usually is! And therefore has to be treated as such.

Hope without infrastructure
I am trying to stay hopeful in this work, and I know I am, but it has to be backed by systems. Hope is useless if it isn’t backed by funding, policy, or accountability. Too often, hope has been asked of young people, frontline workers, and marginalised communities without the support to sustain it.

Trauma-informed as branding
If it’s not backed by training, resources, and respect for the people doing the holding, calling something “trauma-informed” is just a label. Words aren’t enough; calling something trauma-informed does not mean it magically becomes this.

Institutional neutrality
Especially from organisations that benefit when inequality stays the same. Neutrality is not a stance in unequal systems; it’s a position of privilege. Neutrality often places you on the side of the oppressor.

Over-celebrating resilience
Resilience can be survival. It shouldn’t be a policy goal. People need safety, stability, and systems that support them, not narratives that glorify endurance.

Expecting marginalised people to educate for free
Emotional labour is labour. Insight is labour. Retelling trauma for someone else’s learning is labour. It should be treated as such, and yes, that means being paid.

Ulitimately

2025 reminded me that normal rarely announces itself. It seeps in through repetition, through silence, through moments when we let things pass because it’s easier. But what we tolerate quietly shapes the world loudly.

In 2026, I want to be more deliberate about what I allow, what I challenge, and what I help build alongside people who are asking the same questions. Not louder. Not perfect. Just clearer.

Because the work has never been about comfort, but about clarity, and sometimes, clarity is enough to start changing things.

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So often, when we picture an “activist”, we picture someone visible: on panels, on stages, on social media, quoted in articles, leading campaigns with their name attached. And sometimes that visibility really does matter. It can open doors, shift dominant narratives in our culture, or bring urgent attention to issues that have been ignored or actively silenced.

This work is essential, but I also want to gently offer this: some of the most transformative activism I’ve ever witnessed has happened quietly, behind closed doors, without an audience and without recognition.

In the work I have done over the past decades across schools, youth spaces, grassroots movements and national organisations, I’ve seen that real change is rarely instant or shiny. It’s slow, relational, and often deeply uncomfortable, sometimes even scary! It happens in conversations that don’t make it onto Instagram. In a safeguarding meeting. In policy reviews. In reflective practice sessions, people sit with the impact of their words and actions rather than rushing to defend or justify them.

There is a danger in believing that activism only counts when it is seen.

When activism becomes synonymous with visibility, we risk losing sight of why we do this work in the first place. Activism shouldn’t rely solely on panels, public appearances, or events that generate money for ourselves or our organisations, unless that money is directly, transparently, and ethically feeding back into the communities and issues we’re trying to address. Visibility can be powerful, but it can also quietly feed ego. And when the work becomes about being seen, rather than about shifting harm, redistributing power, or supporting those most impacted, its integrity and our work are at risk.

This matters deeply in all our work, particularly those trying to change power dynamics and address topics such as gender based violence, inequality or racism. These are not abstract issues; they show up in classrooms, corridors, families, group chats, workplaces and policies. They are sustained by everyday language, attitudes and systems. Challenging them requires more than a strong public statement in a time of crisis or following a trend; it requires consistent, values-led practice.

This might sound like an odd reflection coming from someone who works in facilitation, campaigns and sometimes public-facing roles. But communication isn’t just about what we say in public. It’s also about how we speak privately to one another. It’s about how we build relationships, share knowledge, distribute power, and hold responsibility.

In anti-racist and feminist work, communication is never neutral. Power, representation and responsibility show up in every interaction, whether it’s an interview for TV or a one-to-one conversation. Who gets listened to? Who gets protected when harm occurs? Who is allowed to learn publicly, and who is punished for making mistakes? Who is given platforms, and who is expected to do emotional labour behind the scenes?

Some of the most meaningful activism I’ve been part of has involved sitting with young people as they unpick harmful gender norms they’ve absorbed since childhood. It’s involved challenging misogyny or racism in rooms where doing so risks being labelled ‘difficult’. It’s involved slowing things down when organisations want quick wins, and instead asking: who is this for, and who might this harm?

One of the things that concerns me most is the rise of what we might call “celebrity activism”. When collective struggle is turned into personal branding, movements can begin to orbit around personalities rather than principles. Individuals are placed on pedestals, and with that pedestal often comes an unspoken right to comfort.

When someone becomes the face of a movement, it can suddenly feel impossible to critique them. Harmful behaviour goes unchallenged because calling it out might ‘damage the cause’ or threaten someone’s platform. Accountability becomes secondary to optics. And in those moments, the very hierarchies we claim to be dismantling are quietly reproduced.

This is especially dangerous in spaces that work with young people, survivors, or marginalised communities. These are spaces that should be rooted in care, consent, accountability and humility. Justice work that centres individual exceptionalism over collective responsibility risks replicating harm, even when the language sounds progressive.

The truth is: activism is rarely glamorous.

It’s about the small actions as much as the big ones. It’s about checking in on a young person after a heavy session. It’s about rewriting a policy so it actually protects people, not just organisations. It’s about challenging a colleague you respect. It’s about noticing who isn’t in the room, and asking why. It’s about stepping back so someone else can step forward.

It’s relational, ongoing, and often invisible to anyone outside of that room.

This kind of activism asks us to de-centre ourselves. To listen more than we speak. To let go of the need to be ‘right’, recognised for our work, or applauded. To commit to learning, especially in the moments when it’s uncomfortable. To understand that accountability is not a threat, but a vital part of collective care.

Why does this matter?

Because movements that rely on visibility alone burn out. Because communities harmed by inequality need a sense of consistency, not a performance. Because young people learn more from what we model than what we say. And because the futures we are trying to build require trust, and that trust is so often built in the quiet, repeated moments where values are put into practice.

If we want to build work that is sustainable, ethical and genuinely transformative, we have to stay grounded. We have to resist the pull of ego and performance. We have to remember that activism isn’t about becoming the centre of the story or the hero, it’s about ensuring the story is bigger than any one of us.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is keep showing up, quietly, with integrity, even when no one is watching.

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When we look at facilitation through a more academic lens, we begin to see its connection to power and agency. Every space we enter is already shaped by structures, gender norms, racial dynamics, hierarchies, histories of harm, and unspoken assumptions about who gets to speak and who gets listened to. A facilitator is not neutral in this. Our presence can either reinforce those patterns or interrupt them. It’s why the way we talk, how we frame questions, whose voices we protect, and the language we choose, matters more than we often acknowledge. And why the way we move in the room, literally and figuratively, can open doors or quietly close them.

One of the things I’ve learned is that facilitation is happening everywhere, even if people don’t name it as such. Teachers are facilitating learning through the emotional climate they create. Youth workers are facilitating trust in moments that are raw or vulnerable. Managers facilitate team dynamics, often without training. And anyone who has ever held a meeting, mediated conflict, or helped a group navigate disagreement has been facilitating in ways that draw on emotional labour, relational intelligence, and social awareness.

I don’t claim to be perfect at this work, but I do know that I’m good at it, not because I position myself as an expert with all the answers, but because I understand that facilitation is not about answers at all. It’s about presence. It’s about noticing. Over the years, I’ve trained myself to read a room in layers: who is holding back, who is dominating, who is at the edge of stepping into their voice, who has shut down because they feel unsafe, who is carrying more than they can say out loud. This awareness guides how I intervene, or whether I intervene at all.

My academic background has shown me that language is never neutral, and my work with young people has taught me the emotional reality of that. The way a question is phrased can determine whether someone feels exposed or empowered. A facilitator must understand trauma without assuming it; must acknowledge power without centering themselves; and challenge harmful beliefs without shaming the person holding them. It is a constant practice of balancing care with clarity, empathy with boundaries, realism with hope.

I have learned to value silence, not as a gap to be filled, but as part of the process. Silence often tells the truth before words do. I’ve watched entire rooms recalibrate in the quiet, giving people time to make sense of themselves. It’s in those moments that facilitation shifts from technique to something closer to stewardship.

And I’ve learned that groups hold an intelligence that individuals alone don’t. My role is not to direct that intelligence but to make space for it. Sometimes that means stepping forward: naming a tension, reframing a question, grounding the room. Other times it means stepping back completely, trusting that people can find their own way if given permission and structure.

The more I do this work, the more I understand facilitation as a relational, ethical practice. It asks for humility, because you are never the centre of the room; the group is. It asks for self-awareness because our biases, histories, and triggers follow us into every space. It asks for compassion because people bring their whole lives into the room, whether they mean to or not. And it asks for courage, because creating space for honest conversation often means sitting with discomfort, both your own and others’.

Facilitation holds power, but it is not a loud power. It is the kind that works quietly in the background, shaping possibilities. When done well, people leave a space feeling more connected, more understood, or more able to speak their truth. They may not be able to pinpoint why. They may not trace it directly back to the facilitator. And that’s precisely how it should be.

I feel grateful that this is the work I get to do. To witness people unfold, or soften, or step into themselves a little more. To create spaces where the things that often go unsaid finally have room to surface. To help groups navigate complexity with compassion. It isn’t glamorous, and it isn’t always easy, but it’s meaningful, deeply so.

Facilitation matters because people matter; it really is that simple. And when we take the time to honour both, something shifts. Sometimes gently. Sometimes profoundly. But always with purpose.

So the big question is, how can we all use facilitation more intentionally in our work? The truth is, every one of us facilitates in some form. We do it in meetings, in classrooms, in youth spaces, in conversations with colleagues, and even in the tiny everyday interactions that shape how people feel. You don’t need a job title to be a facilitator; you simply need to be someone who cares about how a space is held.

One of the most powerful things we can do is pay attention to the emotional atmosphere of a room, not just the task at hand. Every group carries its own mix of tensions, relationships, hopes, and hesitations. When we slow down enough to notice those things, the quiet person who wants to speak, the person withdrawing, the energy shifting, we start to work with the group rather than on top of it.

Language also plays a huge part in facilitation. The way we ask questions shapes the answers we receive. When we move away from questions that test or corner people and towards questions that invite curiosity, what perspectives might we be missing? What’s coming up for people right now? We open the room a little wider. Suddenly, people feel like they’re part of a conversation rather than an evaluation.

And then there’s silence. We’re conditioned to rush into it, to plug the gap, to rescue people from awkwardness. But silence is where people think, breathe, and take stock. Holding it gently, rather than filling it, can give others the space to find words they didn’t know they wanted to say.

Another part of using facilitation well is being honest with ourselves about power. We all hold it differently depending on our role, identity, and the context we’re in. When we acknowledge those dynamics rather than pretending they don’t exist, we make the space more transparent and more honest. People feel when something is unspoken; naming it can loosen the tension.

It’s also important to remember that emotion is not the enemy of productivity. People bring their whole selves into a room, their stresses, their lived experiences, the things they’re carrying that day. Creating space for emotion doesn’t mean making everything heavy. It simply means recognising that people think more clearly when they feel grounded, respected, and seen.

And sometimes, the best facilitation is stepping back. There are moments when a group doesn’t need more guidance, they need room. Letting people lead their own discussion can feel counterintuitive, especially if you’re used to keeping everything on track, but it’s often where the most meaningful connections or insights emerge.

Finally, there’s something powerful about reflecting afterwards, even briefly. Thinking about what felt right, what felt uneasy, and what the room taught you is how facilitation becomes a practice rather than a one-off skill. It’s how we grow our instincts and deepen our care for the spaces we create.

At its heart, facilitation is humanity in action, noticing, listening, adjusting, and trusting. When we approach our work with that kind of intention, no matter our job title, we make our spaces kinder, braver, and more possible for everyone in them.

I remember that moment so clearly, a mixture of relief and hesitation. Part of me felt hopeful that maybe I’d finally find some answers, and part of me felt guilty for even asking the question. I told myself I probably didn’t “need” a diagnosis, that maybe I was just making excuses for being forgetful, disorganised, distracted, and emotional.

I didn’t realise then that I was about to start a five-year wait. Five years of chasing referrals, waiting for updates, and being told that things were “moving along.” I was expedited twice, which gave me hope each time, but somehow it never quite happened. Life kept rolling on, work, relationships, everyday responsibilities, all while carrying uncertainty.

Every year I’d check in with my GP, feeling like a nuisance for asking. Every time I hung up the phone, I felt small. It’s strange how easily we can convince ourselves that we’re asking for too much, even when we’re just trying to understand ourselves.

By June 2025, I’d had enough of waiting. A friend suggested Right to Choose, and I almost brushed it off. I thought it would be complicated, stressful, and bureaucratic. But one quiet afternoon, I decided to look into it properly. It took me less than ten minutes to fill out the form. Ten minutes. After five years of waiting.

And today, after all those years of uncertainty, I finally had my clinical assessment.

I’ve been living with combined-type ADHD for nearly twenty-five years without knowing it.

Hearing the words “you have ADHD” landed with emotions I didn’t quite expect. Relief, obviously. But also grief. So much grief.

Relief, because everything suddenly made sense. The messiness. The overwhelm. The constant cycle of doing too much and then burning out completely. The noise in my head that never quite switches off. The inability to do the simplest things unless there’s urgency, adrenaline, or emotion attached to them.

And grief, because I wish I’d known sooner.

I wish teenage me hadn’t spent so much time feeling like a failure. I wish twenty-something me hadn’t pushed herself to exhaustion trying to keep up, trying to appear “together,” trying to be the version of success everyone else seemed to manage so effortlessly. I wish I’d known that there was a reason, that I wasn’t broken, lazy, or careless.

You might wonder why a diagnosis matters so much. After all, nothing about me physically changed today. I’m still me. Still chaotic, curious, creative, impulsive, and endlessly overthinking. But the power in naming it is profound.

When you live undiagnosed for so long, you build your whole identity around self-blame. You become fluent in guilt. You call yourself “too much” or “not enough.” You learn to apologies for things you can’t control, lateness, forgetfulness or zoning out mid-conversation. You overcompensate by trying harder and harder until you burn out again.

That cycle is exhausting. And today, for the first time, I can see it clearly, and maybe for the first time, I see it gently.

At school, I was the classic “bright but inconsistent” kid. Teachers liked me. I was polite, creative, enthusiastic. But my report cards always said the same thing: “She’s capable, she just needs to focus.” Focus, the one thing I couldn’t do.

I remember sitting in classrooms, staring at the page, trying so hard to make my brain stay still. My mind would wander off into daydreams, questions, and ideas. Then the bell would ring, and I’d realise I hadn’t taken in a single word. I learned to mask early, to look like I was paying attention even when I wasn’t. To smile, to nod, to copy from the whiteboard.

And when I couldn’t keep up, I internalised it. I thought it meant I wasn’t trying hard enough.

That pattern followed me into adulthood. Jobs, deadlines, relationships, I threw myself into everything with intensity, until I ran out of steam. Then came the guilt, the shame, the burnout. Again and again.

And still, I kept going. Because that’s what we do.

Getting this diagnosis doesn’t erase the past, but it reframes it in a way I can see it more kindly.

I can finally look back with compassion instead of criticism. I can see the little girl who was trying so hard to fit into a world that didn’t make space for how her brain worked. I can see the young woman masking her exhaustion with perfectionism. I can see the adult who’s been quietly fighting to stay afloat.

And now I understand my brain a bit better, I can start learning to live differently.

With this diagnosis comes access to real support, medication, therapy, and tools that actually help rather than frustrate. But beyond any of that, it brings permission. Permission to slow down. Permission to rest. Permission to forgive myself for all the times I didn’t understand why things felt so hard. There is something in my brain that causes these things.

ADHD in women often hides in plain sight. We’re taught to be polite, to cope, to manage. We learn to mask, to hold it together on the outside while quietly falling apart inside. We get labelled as “sensitive,” “anxious,” “scatterbrained,” or “emotional.” Rarely ADHD. And so many of us go decades without being seen.

Our struggles are often dismissed because we’ve learned to compensate. We get good grades, hold jobs, and appear “fine.” But inside, it’s constant mental noise, self-doubt, and exhaustion.

That’s why this feels so important, because for the first time, I feel seen, and there is probably also a sense of validation.

Not because everything is suddenly easy, but because I finally understand why it’s been so hard. The diagnosis doesn’t fix me, or solve all my problems; however, it allows me to meet myself where I am, not where I think I should be.

It’s the beginning of what I hope is something softer.

I’m learning to work with my brain instead of against it. I’m learning to forgive the missed appointments, the messy rooms, the forgotten birthdays. I’m learning that I don’t have to earn rest or justify my worth by how productive I am.

More than anything, it’s understanding. It’s relief. It’s the start of a new kind of self-compassion where I can stop fighting who I am and start finally embracing her.

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For me, organisations doing anti-racism work are not an optional “nice-to-have” activity. It is a responsibility. When speaking about whiteness, often people automatically think of skin colour alone. It is not that simple; it is a system of power, access, and privilege that I was born into, benefit from, and continue to reproduce unless I actively work to dismantle it. That means my participation in anti-racism work is not about absolution from this system, but about accountability. It is about confronting my own complicity in racism every single day, whether in how I speak, how I lead, how I make decisions, or how I use my influence.

In my work, I have witnessed the moments when people begin to understand the lived realities of racism and inequality. I have also been a participant in these times. Those moments matter. However, and here is the key part, I have also seen how easy it is for anti-racism work to become performative, especially when white people lead it without reflecting on their own position in power. There is a danger that, without careful attention, anti-racism work becomes a checkbox exercise rather than a radical challenge to the systems that sustain inequality.

This is where complexity comes in. I benefit from racial inequality in ways I may not even recognise. My access to education, my freedom from racial profiling, my ability to move through most public and professional spaces without fear, these are not neutral experiences. They are products of systems of power that privilege whiteness. And yes, that is uncomfortable to acknowledge, and it is uncomfortable to live with. But recognising that discomfort is part of the work. If I avoid it, I am not doing anti-racism work; I am preserving my privilege.

Another layer to this complexity is what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò1 calls deference politics (read more in my blog on deference politics). Deference politics is the belief that people from marginalised groups should be automatically granted authority in political discussions purely based on identity or trauma. In practice, this can look like:

• Adding one woman to a conference panel so organisers can claim “balance.”

• Hiring a “diversity lead” while leaving deeper power structures untouched.

• Expecting people who’ve lived through oppression to educate everyone else, often at great emotional cost.

While the intention here might be to centre marginalised voices, deference politics can become a form of tokenism if it fails to address systemic power. It risks turning lived experience into a box-ticking exercise rather than a sustained shift in power. For me, this reinforces why white people must not only do anti-racism work, but also do it with accountability, challenging not only overt racism, but also the subtle ways power reproduces itself, including through misguided acts of deference.

I have learned that doing anti-racism work as a white person is a constant process of reckoning. It is a willingness to interrogate myself, my assumptions, biases, and behaviours, and to listen to those most affected by racism. It is not about speaking for Black and minoritised people. It is about recognising that those who carry the burden of racial injustice should not be expected to carry the work of dismantling it alone. That expectation is itself a continuation of harm.

For me, this work is deeply personal. I grew up in spaces where race and power were rarely spoken about explicitly. That absence shaped how I entered adulthood, unaware of the structural nature of racism, but aware of a sense of injustice I could not name. Over time, through reading, listening, and doing the work, I have come to understand whiteness not as something incidental but as a framework that shapes everything about my life, the structures I live in and how I contribute.

There have been moments when this realisation has been deeply uncomfortable. For example, in my facilitation work, I’ve had to confront the reality that I often hold the space for anti-racism conversations in ways that are shaped by my own positionality. I’ve made mistakes, moments where I spoke too much, where I assumed I knew the right way to guide a conversation, or where I unintentionally recentred whiteness. Those moments matter. Anti-racism work is not about achieving perfection, but about showing up in humility, being willing to be corrected, and continuing to learn.

Anti-racism work is not a project with a clear endpoint; this work has to be a lifelong commitment. It is relational, political, and deeply structural. It is not something I can ever “complete,” because whiteness is not something I can shed; it will take work to dismantle. That requires constant reflection and action: challenging racist language in the workplace, advocating for equitable policies, listening to and learning from racialised communities, and being willing to redistribute power.

This question also forces me to confront the limits of my own participation. Doing anti-racism work does not mean stepping into every space, speaking over those who are already marginalised, or positioning myself as a “saviour.” True anti-racism work requires asking: Who should be leading this conversation? Who holds lived experience that should be centred? Where might learned experience matter in this? How do I ensure my contribution supports, rather than overshadows?

For me, the answer to “Should white people do anti-racism work?” is rooted in responsibility. If I step away, I leave the work in the hands of those already burdened by oppression. If I step in without humility, I risk reproducing harm. The path is in stepping in, but doing so with deep accountability. It is about resisting comfort, seeking discomfort, and recognising that discomfort is where real growth happens.

This is why I continue to come back to the question. Because anti-racism work is never complete, and the answers are never fixed. It is not about absolution or “getting it right” once. It is about showing up again and again, even when it is hard. It is about sitting with discomfort, naming my privilege, listening without speaking over, and amplifying voices that have been silenced.

There is so much I haven’t covered in this post, there are nuances I have missed and still so much I want to say. So I will continue to come back to these questions, wherever they take me.

For me, doing anti-racism work as a white person has to be met with honesty, humility, and relentless self-examination. The complexity of this work is that there is no perfect way to do it. There is only the commitment to keep doing it, imperfectly but intentionally, until the systems of racial inequality are dismantled.

As a Nigerian American thinker, Táíwò knows what it means to move through the world marked by race, identity, and history. But he also insists we need to be honest about how these calls to “pass the mic” can sometimes backfire. In his book Elite Capture2, he argues that identity politics itself isn’t the problem, it’s how elites and institutions have captured it, turning it into a tool for branding, symbolism, and shallow inclusion.

Think about it: Pride month rolls around, and instead of fighting for queer liberation, we get rainbow-branded cookies and logos with a rainbow on. Conversations about mental health in the workplace? They’re often reduced to wellness apps and “self-care reminders” from bosses who still expect 50-hour weeks. What may have started with radical roots and demands for justice gets co-opted into corporate PR.

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What is deference politics?

Deference politics is the belief that people from marginalised groups should be automatically granted authority in political discussions, purely based on identity or trauma. In practice, it looks like:

• Adding one woman to a conference panel so organisers can claim “balance.”

• Hiring a “diversity lead” while leaving deeper power structures untouched.

• Expecting people who’ve lived through oppression to educate everyone else, often at great emotional cost.

You might look at this and think, “Jess, surely that is a good thing,” and you sort of right. On one level, this makes sense. People do talk over experiences they don’t understand, and historically, women, queer people, Black people, Indigenous people, and so many others were excluded from having any platform at all. Representation matters.

But, as Táíwò points out, the people most harmed by oppression are often not in the room in the first place. This bit is particularly key: the refugee in a camp, the trans woman sleeping rough, the disabled person without access to care, these aren’t usually the people being handed the microphone at conferences or in Parliament. Instead, it’s often those with some privilege, education, money, and networks who are asked to “represent” the marginalised. We know identities are not a monolith; all Queer people will not think the same, and so you cannot add one identity and say you are now “representing” that group of people.

The burden of trauma

The deeper problem, though, is what deference politics asks of trauma. It treats pain as though it’s a credential, as if suffering automatically makes someone wise enough to guide the rest of us.

But trauma doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes it isolates more than it teaches. Sometimes it silences instead of empowering. Expecting the most harmed people to also lead us is not only unfair, it’s unrealistic. As Táíwò puts it bluntly: oppression is not a prep school.

This dynamic also lets those with privilege off the hook. Instead of wrestling with injustice ourselves, we point to someone with the “right” identity and let them do the heavy lifting. Sometimes we even invent an imaginary marginalised perspective to justify our own opinions, dodging accountability. This also links to something called forced vulnerability, meaning that we force people to be vulnerable in the space. Forced vulnerability is not only ineffective: it can be incredibly harmful. It exploits power gradients, disproportionately burdens marginalised and under-represented folks, risks re-traumatisation, and undermines genuine psychological safety. It promises trust but often leaves people feeling more vulnerable than before.

Let me be clear: identity still matters. People are the experts in their own lives, and lived experience provides us with insights that we cannot obtain anywhere else. Black people know things about racism that white people will never grasp from theory alone. Indigenous communities understand the violence of colonisation in ways that can’t be learned in a textbook. Lived experience will always have a place in our politics and our world.

But here’s the problem: in practice, deference politics often means handing the microphone to the person in the room who seems to fit the “most marginalised” category, regardless of whether they have the knowledge, context, or even desire to carry that weight.

Take race as an example. In a meeting or conference, a lone Black colleague might be singled out and expected to speak for “the Black experience,” as though one person can represent an entire community with countless perspectives shaped by class, gender, geography, and history. Sometimes they are treated as an authority not because of their expertise, but simply because of their skin colour. This is not only unfair, it’s harmful. It reduces people to their oppression and places the burden of explanation on their shoulders, often without support.

Meanwhile, those who are most marginalised by racism, the undocumented worker facing daily exploitation, the child navigating a racist school system, are rarely in that room at all. Deference politics ends up amplifying the relatively privileged within marginalised groups, while leaving those most excluded still unheard.

Constructive politics: building, not deferring

So what’s the alternative? Táíwò calls it constructive politics.

Where deference politics is about who speaks, constructive politics is about what we build. It’s not about managing symbolism, but about redistributing real power and resources.

Constructive politics asks:

• Instead of asking who is in the room, how do we build new rooms that include those who are currently excluded?

• Instead of asking people to relive their trauma for our education, how do we honour survival and share responsibility for change?

• Instead of obsessing over “representation” as an end in itself, how do we create structures of solidarity that make representation meaningful?

It’s a shift from guilt to accountability.

Why this matters

Deference politics grew out of a real need: to stop privileged voices from drowning everyone else out. But over time, it’s become a politics of tokenism and burden-shifting. It asks trauma to do work it cannot do, and it allows those with privilege to remain comfortable, morally outsourcing their responsibility.

Constructive politics, by contrast, is demanding, but in the right way. It insists that all of us must take part in the hard work of world-building: creating institutions, movements, and practices that go beyond symbolism to deliver justice.

In his book, Táíwò clearly sees how colonialism, racism, and global inequality shape who gets heard and who gets left behind. He reminds us that “the most marginalised” are rarely the ones in the room, and if we want to centre them, we can’t just defer; we have to build spaces where they can truly belong.

In the end, survival is already extraordinary. The fact that people live through oppression is powerful in itself. We don’t need to demand lessons from that pain. What we need is solidarity, not deference. And solidarity means construction: building the new worlds where justice is not just spoken about, but lived.

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Elite Capture: How The Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Published 2022. 168 pages.

Racism is still here – and the charity sector has work to do

We need to be honest with ourselves: racism is still deeply embedded in the systems we work in. It shapes how charities operate, how schools function, how youth services are resourced, and how young people experience the world around them. Saying this out loud can feel uncomfortable, but avoiding discomfort has never dismantled injustice.

Race as a construct – and why that matters

Race is not a biological truth. It was invented as an idea, a tool used to justify colonialism, slavery, and exploitation, and it continues to influence how our society is organised. That doesn’t make it any less powerful. In fact, it’s one of the strongest organising ideas of our time, shaping who gets opportunities, whose voices are heard, and whose needs are overlooked.

For young people, this reality shows up in everyday ways: in who gets excluded from school, who is over-policed, whose mental health needs are missed, or whose potential is underestimated. The myth of race isn’t abstract. It translates into life chances.

Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it simply: “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” Racism comes first, and race is the justification. If we understand this, then we also understand that it is not enough to respond to the symptoms of racism. We have to tackle the root causes: the racialised worldview that our institutions are built on.

The problem with surface-level equity work

In the charity sector, I see again and again how organisations approach racism through surface-level initiatives. We celebrate “difference” in cultural awareness weeks, we commission endless data reports, but rarely interrogate the assumptions that underpin the very categories we’re measuring.

This isn’t anti-racism. This is managing optics, or at best, reducing harm at the margins. But we cannot work simply at the margins; that does not get to the core of any issue. Anti-racism requires something more radical: challenging the very structures that keep whiteness at the centre and maintain racial hierarchies.

What anti-racism really asks of us

To practice anti-racism, we need to shift our focus away from “adding diversity” towards fundamentally transforming the way power works in our organisations and communities. That means:

• Examining the unspoken norms. Racism hides in what goes unquestioned, how job descriptions are written, how funding is allocated, whose behaviour is labelled “professional” or “disruptive,” whose history is taught in schools. These norms need to be made visible and challenged.

• Mobilising White people. Anti-racism is not the responsibility of Black and/or SWANA people alone. White people, and white-led organisations, which dominate the charity sector, have a responsibility to interrogate their role in upholding racism and to actively dismantle it. Often white people, including myself, can get stuck in white guilt, but we have to move through this to action, to responsibility and solidarity.
  

• Challenging systemic patterns. Racism is not just individual prejudice. Yes, people do racist things, but it’s in the policies that disproportionately exclude Black and Brown young people from education. It’s in the mental health system that doesn’t provide culturally competent care. Tackling it means going beyond interpersonal “bias training” and addressing the structures themselves.
  

• Adopting a complexity mindset. Racism is not a problem with a quick fix. It evolves, it adapts, it embeds itself in new forms. Tick-box toolkits and “one-off” training won’t solve it. What we need is a culture of experimentation, reflection, and ongoing learning. I will never know it all, as a white person, I will always be playing catch-up. I will and have made mistakes, but I am learning how I respond to those mistakes that matter and how I show up, unlearn, relearn and everything in between.
  

• Making power visible. At its heart, anti-racism is about power: who holds it, how it’s used, and how it’s shared. Too often, power is hoarded in leadership structures that don’t reflect the communities they claim to serve. Anti-racism requires us to redistribute power, and when power is shared, everyone benefits.
  

Why this matters in youth work and the charity sector

Working with young people has taught me how urgently this matters. Young people are perceptive. They can see when organisations are tokenistic, when their voices are used for decoration rather than decision-making, and when promises of “inclusion” don’t match reality. They are also some of the most impacted by systemic racism: from the education system to the job market, from housing to health care.

As adults and professionals in the sector, we have a duty to make sure our work doesn’t just reinforce the very systems we claim to challenge. That means asking hard questions of ourselves and our organisations:

• Who gets funded, and who doesn’t?
  

• Who is at the table when decisions are made?
  

• Who gets to be seen as a leader, and who gets labelled “hard to reach”?
  

• Whose stories are amplified, and whose are ignored or silenced?
  

I want to end by naming my own position in this work. I am a white person, and that means I benefit from systems of racism, whether I want to or not. Doing this work does not make me exempt from racism, nor does it absolve me of responsibility. I am part of a society that privileges me in ways that others are denied, and I carry racial bias and conditioning like anyone else raised in a structurally racist world. My commitment, I suppose, is to stay accountable, to keep learning and unlearning, and to use my position to challenge the systems that advantage me while harming others. Anti-racism is not about distancing ourselves from racism; that’s white saviourism. It is about recognising our place within it, and choosing to act against it every day.

The truth is that anti-racism will never feel comfortable. It requires us to interrogate our own assumptions, to challenge traditions in the sector, and to face up to the fact that well-meaning initiatives can still be complicit in maintaining racism.

However, it is necessary work. If we are serious about building a fairer future, especially for young people, then anti-racism cannot be optional or superficial. It must be central to everything we do: from how we design services, to how we share power, to how we build coalitions across communities.

As writer Ijeoma Oluo says, “You don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. The work is to fight it wherever you find it, including in yourself.”

That goes for us as individuals, and it goes for organisations too. Anti-racism isn’t about perfection; it’s about commitment. Commitment to honesty, to systemic change, to solidarity, and to reimagining the structures we’ve inherited.

This work is urgent. It is radical. And it belongs to all of us.

It showed a protester lying on the ground, holding a bloodied placard. Above them was a judge with their gavel raised, caught in the moment before impact. Here is what is really interesting and clever…

The setting: the Queen’s Building, part of the Royal Courts of Justice. A symbol of the British legal system, and, by extension, of the state’s monopoly on violence.

Within hours, the mural was boarded up. Officials tried to defend this by using the wall’s listed status, but it was clear the content of the artwork struck a nerve with those in power. The government got to work trying to erase it.

And yet, even after they boarded it up and tried to scrub it clean, the outline remains.

The shadow of the mural is still there, fainter but unmistakable.

As someone who uses art, who loves art and sees deep meaning in many forms of arts, whether that be paintings, poetry or pictures I of course have a few words to say about this.

But firstly, I wonder if and have my suspicions that Banksy had a feeling the mural would be scrubbed and knew this would happen. That even the act of censorship would become part of the piece. That truth, once painted, can’t be fully wiped off or eradicated. It leaves residue. It stains the surface. It continues a conversation that sticks in the public minds.

And in this moment, what truth could be more urgent, more censored, more brutalised, than the truth of what’s happening in Palestine?

While murals are being scrubbed in London, entire neighbourhoods in Gaza are being wiped off the map. Families are being buried beneath rubble. Children are being denied the chance of growing up. And here in Britain, the government, and now the Labour Party,is not only complicit, it is actively silencing those who speak out.

Labour’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation to some may be seen as bureaucratic move. But in reality it is an attempt to criminalise resistance, to conflate solidarity with extremism and to frame nonviolent direct action as a national threat.

You don’t have to agree with every tactic Palestine Action has used to see what this is. It's a warning. A message that if you stand against empire, if you challenge profit, if you disturb the polite performance of democracy, you will be punished.

Meanwhile, the real terrorism, the bombing of hospitals, the starvation of civilians, the targeted killing of journalists, the erasing of refugee camps, continues with impunity.

It’s hard not to see the mural and the complicity in what is happening in Gaze as part of the same story. Both, on very different levels, are about control, about whose voice is allowed to speak, whose pain is allowed to be seen, whose lives are allowed to matter. Both are about the state’s violent need to maintain the illusion of legitimacy, even as it upholds injustice.

And yet, just like the faded outline on the mural, something always remains. Palestine persists. Its people continue to resist, even in the face of unimaginable horror. And here, too, solidarity refuses to be erased. It resurfaces in protests, in posters, in vigils, in student encampments, in the acts of refusal and the cries for justice.

Art that exposes power is never just about the image, it’s about what the image reveals when power tries to cover it up.

So no, they couldn’t fully erase the mural. They couldn’t scrub away the truth. And they won’t erase Palestine either.

Not from our walls.
Not from our words.
Not from history.

The shadow will remain.

We just have to ask ourselves what side of history do you want to be on?

“This isn't just about art. It's about Palestine. It’s about power. And it’s about who gets to speak.”

As someone who has trained professionals in mental health, I can attest to the reality that practitioners often face in the current system. The pressures of a profit-driven healthcare model, combined with limited resources, create an environment where quick fixes are prioritised over long-term solutions. Mad World challenges this approach by advocating for a radical reimagining of mental health care, one that is rooted in social justice, community support, and systemic change. Frazer-Carroll draws on movements like disability justice and abolitionism to propose alternatives that focus on healing rather than managing illness. This perspective is crucial for those of us working within the system to effect meaningful change.

Often when struggling with mental health, people are ascribed to a set of symptoms to be treated, when in reality our struggles are not simply individual failings but responses to a world that is, in many ways, designed to make us unwell. It offers a framework for understanding mental distress as a rational reaction to societal pressures, providing both validation and a call to action.

Having read it a few years ago, it is now a book that has profoundly impacted my understanding of mental health. For years, I struggled to articulate the sense that something was deeply wrong, not with me, but with the world around me. This book provided the language and framework to understand that feeling.

Frazer-Carroll argues that capitalism, with its emphasis on productivity and individualism, creates conditions that foster mental distress. They suggest that the proliferation of conditions like depression and anxiety under capitalism represents a pathological by-product of exploitative economic arrangements rather than individual psychopathology. This perspective resonated with me. It helped me see that my struggles were not personal failings but responses to a system that values profit over people. It was a revelation that shifted my understanding of mental health from an individual issue to a societal one.

The book also explores how mental health is constructed under capitalism. Frazer-Carroll critiques the prevailing biomedical discourse surrounding mental illness, arguing that the dominant psychiatric paradigm individualises and medicalizes anguish, constructing it as an interior defect amenable to pharmaceutical intervention rather than a rational response to systemic dehumanisation. This critique challenged me to reconsider the narratives I had internalised about mental health. It prompted me to question the efficacy and ethics of pharmaceutical interventions and to explore alternative approaches to care that prioritise community and systemic change. This is not to say medication is not important, as someone who has been on the maximum dose of Sertraline for the past 3 years, I know how powerful it can be. More so that we have to see mental health in the context of both the person and the world they live in.

Frazer-Carroll draws on movements like disability justice and abolitionism to propose a radical reimagining of mental health care. They emphasise the importance of community-based care and the need to challenge the structures that perpetuate inequality and oppression. This approach has been transformative for me. It has inspired me to advocate for mental health care that is inclusive, compassionate, and just. It has also motivated me to support others in their journeys toward healing, recognising that collective well-being is intertwined with individual well-being.

Mad World challenges readers to rethink their perceptions of mental health and to consider how societal structures contribute to mental distress. It offers a framework for understanding mental distress as a response to societal pressures rather than an inherent flaw, offering hope and a pathway toward collective healing and systemic change.

For anyone seeking to understand the deeper connections between society and mental health, this book is an invaluable resource. It provides the tools to critically examine the systems that shape our experiences and to envision a world where mental health is not a commodity but a collective right.

And after all this time, how does he respond?

Not with humility. Not with reflection. But with a painfully self-serving Instagram statement about being “cancelled for convenience” and “tried by the media.” He warns he won’t go quietly and that “the full story of this incredible injustice must be told.” But the part that stood out to me, and not in a good way, was when he cited his newly confirmed autism diagnosis as a factor that had been ignored for years, calling the environment at MasterChef “dangerous” for him.

Now, let me just say: neurodivergence deserves understanding, accommodations, and support, especially in workplaces where it’s so often misunderstood or pathologised. But what I can’t accept is someone weaponising a diagnosis after the fact to deflect from serious allegations of harm. Neurodivergence is not an excuse for violence. It’s not a reason for touching people without consent. It doesn’t justify sexualised jokes or workplace power trips. And it definitely doesn’t make you the victim in a situation where you were the one causing harm.

This is not just about Greg Wallace, I keep thinking about the people who worked alongside him, likely younger, less powerful, probably women or marginalised folk, who had to just get on with it while these things happened. Who didn’t feel safe to speak up, or did speak up and were ignored. Because let’s be honest: if Gregg Wallace was allowed to act like this for 17 years, it wasn’t just his behaviour that was the problem. It was the culture that protected him. The people who enabled it. The silence that stretched around him for so long that he believed he couldn’t be held accountable.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen it time and time again. Powerful white men in the public eye caught out for sexist, abusive or predatory behaviour, and instead of taking responsibility, they reach for whatever narrative they think will redeem them. Mental health. Cancel culture. Neurodivergence. It’s always “poor me,” never “how do I begin to repair the harm I’ve done?”

It’s not just disrespectful, it’s dangerous. Because the moment someone in a position of power starts using a diagnosis as a shield against consequences, they reinforce all the worst stereotypes about neurodivergent people. They feed into the idea that we’re all socially inappropriate or emotionally disconnected, when in reality, most of us are navigating the world with deep sensitivity, care, and emotional labour that often goes unnoticed.

Let’s also not forget that neurodivergent people, especially women, queer folks, and people of colour, are more likely to be victims of abuse, not perpetrators of it. And we’re also more likely to be punished or excluded from workplaces for traits and behaviours that powerful men like Gregg have been celebrated for. Assertiveness, honesty, intensity, these things look “bold” on a man with status, but “difficult” or “unprofessional” on anyone else.

So when someone like Gregg Wallace steps forward and uses autism as part of his defence, it doesn’t just undermine accountability, it also makes it harder for genuine conversations about neurodivergence and inclusion to happen. It risks silencing neurodivergent people who are already scared to disclose at work. It adds fuel to the idea that we’re “too complex,” “too risky,” or “too controversial” to be believed or accommodated.

But ultimately, this isn’t just about him. It’s about all the systems and structures that allowed him to behave like this for so long. The BBC. The production teams. The culture of celebrity that protects men who are “good for ratings.” The subtle sexism and power dynamics that meant his actions were minimised, normalised, and brushed aside until they weren’t anymore.

And we need to ask: what does it take for people like Gregg Wallace to be held accountable? And why does it take this much, this many stories, this much pain, this long, for it to happen?

I’m tired of powerful men making the story about their downfall instead of the years of harm they’ve caused. I’m tired of conversations about inclusion being hijacked by people who only care about their diagnosis when it suits them. And I’m tired of people confusing understanding with absolving, because we can hold compassion for neurodivergent people while still holding them accountable for the harm they cause.

What we need is a cultural shift. One where accountability isn’t seen as a punishment, but a process of repair. One where neurodivergent people are supported, included, and protected without being used as a scapegoat for the failings of powerful men. And one where harm is taken seriously the first time someone speaks up, not 17 years later.

Because the real injustice isn’t Gregg Wallace finally losing his platform. The real injustice is how long it took for anyone to listen.