The Welsh Gender Service (WGS) has been described as a “potential Service of Concern” in an internal NHS document published online. A Service of Concern is a formal NHS designation, meaning there has been “significant singular service failures, or cumulative or systemic concerns regarding a service or setting”.

The WGS, based in Cardiff, is the only clinic in Wales allowed to refer NHS patients for genital surgeries and mastectomies. In May, GenderBlog revealed that the WGS was referring adult patients for genital surgeries and mastectomies at three to four times the rate per head of population than other UK clinics. If the Service of Concern process establishes there is “a clear and significant risk to patient safety”, the WGS will go into special measures.

The first official acknowledgment that NHS Wales might have a rogue outfit on its hands has been set out in an agenda item for the Quality, Safety and Outcomes Sub-Committee of the NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee (JCC), which is due to meet on Monday. The JCC represents all seven Health Boards in Wales and is responsible for commissioning NHS adult gender services in Wales. Monday’s Quality, Safety and Outcomes Sub-Committee agenda item says the WGS is “currently under consideration as a potential Service of Concern, reflecting issues identified through ongoing review and assurance processes. These include higher rates of surgical referral than seen in comparable services in England and concerns regarding referral appropriateness.”

Other mysterious “issues”

An independent review into the WGS was ordered by the NHS Wales Joint Commissioning Committee in July 2024. It has yet to start. Since the beginning of 2024, the WGS has sent a minimum of 441 women for “Masculinising Chest Surgery” (mainly, but not limited to double mastectomies). It sent a minimum of 311 men to have their genitals removed and/or a hole dug between their legs to act as a receptacle for someone else’s penis (”Feminising Genital Surgery”) and a minimum of 102 women to potentially have a hysterectomy, their vaginas sewn shut and a tube-shaped roll of skin and fat attached to their bodies (”Masculinising Genital Surgery”).

I have gone deeper into the figures here, but by way of example, Scotland’s four NHS adult gender clinics sent a maximum of 264 women for chest surgery over 2024 and 2025, despite having a significantly larger population than Wales. We don’t yet know how many referrals there have been in 2026.

The Welsh statistics are startling, but they are not the only reason for identifying the WGS as a potential service of concern. The agenda item notes other “issues” have been identified “through ongoing review and assurance processes”. I asked NHS Wales what they are and was told “matters have been identified through NHS Wales JCC’s routine review and assurance processes. These processes are designed to ensure appropriate scrutiny and oversight where further discussion or investigation is required... NWJCC is actively considering these matters through its established governance arrangements”. Much clearer. Thanks.

Don’t Stop Chopping

Alarmingly, Monday’s Quality, Safety and Outcomes Sub-Committee agenda item informs the JCC that the independent review into the WGS “will focus primarily on assessment, referral and non-surgical aspects of the pathway, while considering relevant pathway interfaces and engaging key stakeholders, including health boards, partner organisations, patients and carers.” [my italics]

It’s not clear exactly what this entails, but NHS Wales have given no indication they will pause surgery referrals or scheduled surgeries whilst the review is ongoing (even though there is a broad precedence for this at NHS Lothian). When I put the question to NHS Wales directly, they ignored it. When I went back to them and said that if they did not give me a clear response I would assume the surgeries and surgery referrals were still going ahead during the review, they acknowledged the question but still declined to answer. We can therefore assume surgeries and surgery referrals will continue during the review, despite evidence they might not be safe.

This is traumatising for families. One parent, whose adult child is scheduled to have a vaginoplasty in October after a referral from the WGS, is distraught with worry. Her son is autistic and has developmental issues amongst several other serious co-morbidities. The parent, who did not want to be named, told me she found the WGS a difficult organisation to deal with:

“They’re negligent and quite aggressive actually. Tunnel-visioned and very self-important. They’re not behaving in a clinical way. They’ve got an agenda.” I asked her if she thought the WGS is causing patients harm. “Absolutely. They don’t consider the person or the families involved. They’re just hell-bent on getting these kids through their treatment - onto hormones and onto the theatre table, basically. They’re brutal.”

“She made me feel like I was an enemy“

The head of the Welsh Gender Service, Dr Sophie Quinney, is an avowed activist, who has stated her commitment to helping her patients get what they are demanding, be it drugs and/or surgery. She was recently (rather gently) admonished by the British Medical Association for grabbing a videographer’s phone out of his hand at a demo in April.

Dr Quinney’s bedside manner was singled out for criticism by the parent whose son is going under the knife in October. “She scared me. She made me feel intimidated and distressed. She made me feel quite desperate. I remember the secretary trying to comfort me there one day. She made me feel like I was an enemy, and I am only trying to care for my son.”

The parent cannot believe her son’s operation is not being put back whilst the review into WGS is being carried out. “It’s criminal. If they’re going to put people through those operations before knowing the outcome of the review... then as I far as I’m concerned that’s a criminal act. It’s totally irresponsible.”

In May, during a regular JCC meeting set up to discuss every aspect of care provided by NHS Wales, the chair of the JCC highlighted his “specific responsibility” to the Welsh Health Secretary to “make sure… that I was keeping him sighted” on the progress of the WGS review. It is due to report before the end of the year.

The British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) has proposed requiring its therapists to “actively promote inclusion” during therapy sessions and “ensure that any discriminatory attitudes and behaviours are challenged” when expressed by patients.

The BABCP regulates psychotherapists and BABCP accreditation is considered important for any Cognitive Behavioural Therapist (CBT) working in the NHS. It has more than 23,000 members. The new requirements are part of a proposed overhaul to the BABCP’s Standards of Conduct, Performance and Ethics, which, if approved, will come into force later this year.

The standards tell therapists that “discrimination can be challenged by speaking up... it may be possible to ask for a change of behaviour, provide accurate information to dispel stereotyping, misconceptions or generalisations, or to provide resources to educate and explain why it is harmful.”

The proposals have outraged some BABCP members, with one therapist saying Standard 1, which incorporates the above requirements, is “based on identity politics, lacks neutrality and clarity, promotes un-therapeutic behaviours and is inappropriate for the BABCP, a supposedly scientific organisation.”

Susan Forbes is a BABCP member and has been a psychotherapist for 25 years. She has worked with detransitioners and individuals with what she calls “gender distress”. Forbes tells me “there is a great difference between not discriminating against a client and being required to challenge discriminatory attitudes. A CBT therapist might want to explore how an expressed discriminatory belief relates to the client’s difficulties, but that is very different from the therapist having an externally imposed obligation to ‘challenge’ the attitude, which conflicts with the fundamental CBT principle of collaborative empiricism.”

Avy Joseph is the co-founder of the College of Cognitive Behavioural Therapies. He says, “consider two therapists with opposing views on sex and gender identity. Is a gender-critical therapist required to challenge a client’s belief in gender identity? Is a therapist who accepts gender identity required to challenge a client’s gender-critical beliefs? If only one of those positions is considered discriminatory, on what professional or evidential basis has that judgement been made?”

The current Standards, approved in 2012, tell therapists “you must not allow your views about a client, patient or service user’s characteristics to affect the way you treat them or the advice you give. Some characteristics are legally protected. You must not assume that service user characteristics, protected or otherwise, are inferior to others and must not seek to change or suppress them on that basis.”

Dangerous

The problems with the new Standards is compounded by another requirement in Standard 1, which tells therapists they “must not attempt to change, coerce, suppress, or manipulate an individual’s identity, faith, philosophical, religious or political beliefs or any other protected characteristic.”

This clause appears to be in conflict with the clauses requiring therapists to challenge their clients. As one BABCP member tells me:

“Suppose a client holds a sincerely held religious or philosophical belief that the therapist, BABCP or another person considers discriminatory. What exactly is the therapist required to do? If the therapist challenges the belief, offers education and attempts to persuade the client that the belief is harmful, at what point does that become an attempt to change a protected belief, which the following standard expressly prohibits? Conversely, if the therapist respects the client’s belief and does not attempt to change it because doing so is irrelevant to the agreed therapeutic goals, could the therapist then be accused of failing to challenge a discriminatory attitude? The therapist therefore appears potentially caught between two competing professional obligations: do not attempt to change protected beliefs, but do challenge beliefs considered discriminatory.”

As my source points out “This is not an obscure theoretical problem. Religious and philosophical beliefs frequently concern sex, sexuality, gender, marriage, family structures, morality and other subjects on which profound disagreements exist within a pluralistic society. Some of those beliefs may qualify for legal protection even where other people regard them as offensive or discriminatory.”

Forbes calls the proposed ban on challenging beliefs “dangerous”, because “it makes it impossible for the therapist to work in the client’s best interest. We cannot offer effective therapy if we treat every aspect of their self-concept as immune from therapeutic examination or change.”

Colin Lenton, another BABCP member agrees: “We cannot be good therapists or counsellors without inviting our clients to explore where their feelings and beliefs come from, not to just accept everything the client says as true. We all change our minds about lots of things. If i believe something that is going to lead me to cut off body parts or go on life-changing hormones and drugs for the rest of my life, it is not care for a therapist to just accept that without inviting me to be clear in my mind that I know and understand where these thoughts come from, and if they are indeed what I want or what is best for me.”

The Fear of Misgendering

The requirement to “actively promote inclusion” seems to be politically loaded. In the proposed Standards, “inclusion” is defined as “working towards and maintaining environments where everyone - regardless of background, identity, or ability - is welcomed, respected, and supported to participate as fully as possible”. On the current BABCP website page Why Pronouns Matter, inclusion seems to mean something different. Under the heading Creating an Inclusive Environment, the BABCP tells its members “We encourage all members of the BABCP to share their pronouns in their email signatures, on name tags at events, and in introductions. This not only helps normalise the practice but also alleviates the fear of misgendering someone. It’s a simple step, but a powerful one in creating an inclusive environment.”

Dr Carole Sherwood, a retired clinical psychologist who runs the campaign Save Mental Health and remains a BABCP member, says on this point, the proposed Standards “do not differentiate between adults and children. The use of pronouns with gender questioning children could be viewed as an attempt to facilitate social transition - which is against the recommendations of the Cass Review.”

The BABCP has “scientific research and the application of evidence based practice” as one of its founding principles, but a number of BABCP members are concerned the organisation has been moving away from those principles and towards unscientific activism. Whilst the organisation could not muster a response to the Cass Review, when the For Women Scotland Supreme Court ruling landed in April 2025, the BABCP put out a statement saying it was “concerned about the impact” the judgment would have “on mental health and wellbeing for trans, non-binary, intersex, gender-questioning people (TN-B/I) and those close to them”. It then descended into a kind of word soup about “biological determinism”, asserting that the ruling could be “questioned on grounds that it does not take into account scientific understandings of gender diversity and could cause harm to TN-B/I people.”

The statement finished by listing sources of “support”, which started with Mermaids, and included GIRES, the LGBT Foundation, the Good Law Project and TransActual.

Beautiful Eco-Distress

In November 2025, the BABCP published a Climate Change Guide to help therapists treating patients with “eco-distress”. The document included a BABCP statement telling its members “we are in a climate and ecological emergency” and urging them to “take action on climate change. Whether this is within management, leadership, research, training or the clinic.” The guide also describes eco-distress as a “beautiful, ethical, and appropriate human response” to our warming planet, and says therapists “must not try to change” anyone expressing it, even children.

This prompted a complaint from Dr Sherwood who wrote to the BABCP trustees in February this year, telling them: “young children have been exposed to rather too much adult catastrophising and preoccupation with climate change, and this has likely led to unnecessary anxiety and distress. The idea that they should be encouraged to wallow in despair is frankly irresponsible. Has no-one at the BABCP ever paused to consider whether its own catastrophising language and behaviour may be contributing to and maintaining people’s distress about climate change?”

Taking aim at the document as a whole, Dr Sherwood said “The widespread use of political and hyperbolic language and calls for positive action throughout this guide indicates that it is an activist-led rather than clinically informed document. Calls to go ‘beyond scientific evidence’, to turn to ‘indigenous wisdom’ and to transform ‘the current economic system’ should be anathema to an organisation promoting an evidence-based talking therapy, not economic change or environmental activism.”

In March this year, Susan Forbes also lodged a formal complaint, telling the BABCP trustees she was “increasingly concerned that the organisation has moved away from its stated purpose of advancing cognitive behavioural therapy through scientific research and evidence-based practice. Recent developments reveal a shift toward the adoption of ideologically-driven frameworks that are not grounded in a robust evidence base and which many members would dispute on clinical, ethical, and scientific grounds.”

Sherwood echoes Forbes’ concerns, telling me: “When I rejoined as a member last year I was dismayed to witness the extent of activist influence and decision-making based on EDI rather than clinical principles. Although other professional organisations (BPS, BACP) have fallen to activism, I thought CBT would be the last bastion to hold out against politicisation but I was wrong.”

Whilst eco-guides and website posts on the fear of misgendering are one thing, the proposed new BABCP Standards are another. They are the rules by which all members must operate. Therapists can be investigated and disbarred if they are found to have breached the Standards.

When approached about the controversial clauses in Standard 1, the BABCP told me it had “held a widely-publicised six-month long consultation process which gathered hundreds of responses from members and stakeholders. The clauses you reference were part of that consultation and concerns about their interpretation or application were precisely the kind of feedback the process was designed to capture. The consultation closed at the end of July and the wording of the Standards is now being finalised in light of all the feedback received. On the specific tensions you identify between clauses 1.4 and 1.5 [the requirements to challenge attitudes and behaviours whilst also not trying to change protected beliefs] this is a question of the interpretation of professional standards and the consultation was designed to address that. As the wording has not been finalised, it would not be appropriate to comment further.”

The BABCP further affirmed its commitment to “the safety, quality and accessibility of evidence-based psychological therapies for all people who need them, regardless of their identity or beliefs as well as supporting our members to practise to the highest professional standards.”

The final draft Standards will go to the

Hi

I have been on holiday with the family, hence the lack of GenderBlog activity. Just before I went, on 1 and 2 August I did a couple of breakfast presenting shifts for Times Radio. One of the subjects which came up was the strange case of Jason Arday.

A breakfast radio shift is tough, you are required to get up at 3am and be ready to ask coheren…

Read more

The Information Commissioner in Scotland, David Hamilton, has told NHS Fife to make its 2024 Trans Policy available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. NHS Fife has thus far refused to release the document, citing a number of exemptions, all of which have been rejected by the Commissioner.

NHS Fife has until 13 August to comply with Hamilton’s instruction. The decision comes six months after the Scottish ICO issued a level 4 Intervention (the most serious) over NHS Fife’s handling of FOI requests relating to the amount of public money spent defending the Peggie tribunal.

That Peggie tribunal (which is being appealed) did an awful lot to expose the extent to which the NHS has been gripped by gender ideology. Disinfectant is the best disinfectant, but sunlight helps.

Mark of the Bumba

In July last year, during the first phase of witness evidence at the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal, an interested member of the public (let’s call him Simon) began to scrutinise some of NHS Fife’s published documents. One of the documents Simon found was the minutes of an NHS Fife Equality and Human Rights Strategy Group meeting, held on 1 Feb 2024. This was just over a month after Sandie Peggie’s infamous encounter with a male doctor in a female changing room. The minutes were attached to the agenda for a Staff Governance meeting, held in March 2024.

During the February meeting, Isla Bumba, NHS Fife’s Equality and Human Rights lead (who claims not to know what sex she is) asked for “feedback, comments and approval” of her “NHS Fife Wide Trans, Non-binary and Gender Non-conforming Patient’s Policy”. She told the meeting that the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) had “reviewed and approved” the policy “from a Trans-community perspective”.

The timing of the document and the manner of its approval piqued Simon’s interest. For one thing, the Terrence Higgins Trust’s expertise is primarily focused on destigmatising HIV and preventing its spread. The THT is an avowed trans ally organisation, but again, primarily through the lens of sexual health.

Simon wrote to NHS Fife, asking it to disclose a copy of Bumba’s Trans Policy, plus “communications between the Authority and the THT related to this and other possible trans policies, including, but not limited to, those affecting staff”. He also asked for any subsequent or replacement policies and “any written policy, guidance or other instructions with regard to trans staff members’ rights to access sex/gender segregated spaces that were in force from January 2023 until the date of receipt of this request”, which was 26 Feb 2025.

At the time, NHS Fife’s Information Governance & Security Lead was Matt Valenti. Valenti had ultimate responsibility for handling Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. He is a Unison union rep and helped found NHS Fife’s LGBT+ Network. Valenti’s twitter profile looks like this:

Valenti is up front about his politics. Here is a cartoon he retweeted whilst the Peggie tribunal was active:

Despite Valenti’s enthusiasm for trans rights, NHS Fife was less keen on revealing its trans policies, nor how they came about.

Absolute Tosh

Simon’s first FOI request got a response on 27 March 2025 from Kellyanne Tosh, an Information Governance and Security Advisor on the NHS Fife FOI team. Tosh accepted Bumba’s draft Trans Policy was reviewed at a meeting in 2024, but said it was “not progressed”.

By way of a short lecture (”Public interest is not necessarily the same as what interests the public”), Tosh refused to disclose the document and any communication around it, “as this may prejudice/be detrimental.”

Tosh did not explain what disclosure might prejudice or be detrimental toward, but she did supply NHS Scotland’s current “Gender Transitioning Guide“, which was in the process of being adopted by all NHS Trusts across Scotland. The Guide apparently helps “managers and employees understand and support colleagues who are considering, undergoing, or have undergone a gender reassignment process” by using language about sex “assigned at birth” and the legally confused statement: “no one should disclose information about someone’s gender reassignment without their explicit written consent. Such a disclosure may be a criminal offence.”

The Guide makes for interesting reading (particularly regarding its policy on changing rooms), but Simon wanted Isla Bumba’s Trans Policy and more information about the people who helped shape it. He asked for an internal review, stating: “Whether or not NHS Fife considers it in the public’s interest, as opposed to of interest to the public, isn’t relevant when the public has the right to be provided that information. Also, whether or not NHS Fife considers that the information “may prejudice/be detrimental” isn’t relevant if the public has the right to access that information. Prejudice what exactly? Be detrimental to whom exactly? Detrimental to NHS Fife? How?”

The Freedom of Information Act guidance on SICO’s website states: “The aim of a review is to allow [an] authority to take a fresh look at its response to an information request, to confirm the decision (with or without modifications) or, if appropriate, to substitute a different decision. The review procedure must therefore be fair and impartial and allow decision makers to look at the request afresh... It is good practice for the reviewer to be a person who did not respond to or advise on the original request (where possible or practicable).”

More Tosh?

On 10 April 2025, an unnamed “NHS Fife Information Governance and Security Advisor” (possibly Kellyanne Tosh wearing a fake beard and sunglasses) wrote to Simon, telling him “NHS Fife has completed our review... and our decision is to uphold the original response.”

The unnamed IG&S Advisor said NHS Fife was relying on two exemptions - “Information otherwise accessible/available”, ie the information Simon was seeking was already publicly available, (which it wasn’t), and “Personal Information”, ie the information he was seeking contained people’s personal information (which most of it didn’t) and therefore couldn’t be disclosed. The rest of the email was copied and pasted from the first refusal (including the “Public interest is not necessarily the same as what interests the public” line) and the same Gender Transitioning Guide was attached as before.

Simon escalated his complaint to the Scottish Information Commissioner’s Office (SICO), which wrote to NHS Fife, asking them to explain a little more about the thinking behind their decision, and how it related to their obligations under law. SICO also requested sight of the documents NHS Fife were refusing to disclose.

Prompted by this, NHS Fife decided to throw a few more exemptions at the wall, including “Health and Safety” (arguing disclosure would “endanger the physical or mental health or the safety of an individual”) and “Prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs”, finally finishing the sentence it had previously left dangling by asserting that disclosing the documents “may prejudice/be detrimental to the ongoing case“ (my italics) - presumably a reference to the still extant Sandie Peggie tribunal.

Documents were disclosed by NHS Fife to SICO in two stages - the Trans Policy and emails relating to it as requested, and then, after the SICO realised there was more information NHS Fife was holding, it took receipt of “two versions of the draft policy, one sent by the Authority to the THT and one returned to the Authority with comments added by the THT. Two further attachments, with
additional relevant reference information belonging to another third-party organisation, were also attached.”

Simon 3 v 0 NHS Fife

After reviewing all the submissions made by Simon and NHS Fife, the Information Commissioner issued a decision nation on 29 June this year. David Hamilton agreed the information was disclosable, and none of NHS Fife’s proposed exemptions applied. He also took a dim view of their review, noting “There was no evidence in the review outcome provided to the Applicant [Simon] that a fresh look had been taken, or that the reviewer was a person who had not been involved in the initial response. As the applicant highlighted, the text of the response and review appeared to be the same.” NHS Fife, when asked to explain itself, “provided no comment or submissions”.

Hamilton ruled that NHS Fife “failed to comply” with the FOI Act Scotland in three ways - its response to Simon, by withholding information it had a duty disclose and by failing to properly search for all relevant material. The Commissioner has ordered NHS Fife to disclose the documents Simon requested by 13 August and carry out a proper search for other relevant material.

I asked Simon what he thought. He said, “I honestly find the whole thing so confusing. They’re supposed to be a hospital. Why are they doing any of this?”

A former Inclusion/Audience Development Coordinator has lost her claim against Belfast Film Festival for discrimination, harassment and constructive dismissal.

Sara Morrison was employed by the Belfast Film Festival (BFF) for more than four years between February2020 and November 2024, when she resigned.

Her tribunal took place in November 2025 and was extensively covered on my website, funded entirely by readers.

In a ruling dated 17 July 2026, employment judge Lisa Sturgeon and her fellow panel member Michael McKeown (a third panel member having stepped down mid-trial after a recusal application) decided that “the claimant’s claims are dismissed in their entirety”.

What Sara Said

The case hinged on actions taken and emails sent by the Belfast Film Festival after Morrison gave a short speech at a Let Women Speak rally in Belfast in April 2023 (read it here). There was a noisy counter-demonstration nearby, which attempted to drown out the LWS event. During the speech Morrison called out several organisations, some of whom were participating in the counter-demo, saying:

“These organisations, these women’s organisations: WRDA, Alliance For Choice, Women’s Policy Group Northern Ireland, The Women’s Sector Lobbyist, Rape Crisis Nl... have morphed into a deliberate campaign of bullying and intimidation into silence through harassment and bullying the very women they should be protecting and exalting.”

There was a reaction on social media to Morrison’s speech where she was identified as being a BFF employee. The BFF were tagged in various posts and they received several direct emails.

Permission Not Sought

The judgement’s first significant finding is that Morrison had a contractual obligation to ask permission to speak at the event, which she did not seek. The judge noted that when the BFF’s Managing Director, Michele Devlin, was asked to take part in an election video supporting a Sinn Fein candidate, she sought (and was granted) permission from the board to do so. The judge also found that using Devlin as a comparator for the purposes of the tribunal was inappropriate. Although Devlin was a BFF employee, she “did not share the claimant’s political opinion, she did not occupy the same or a materially similar role” therefore the appropriate comparator was a “hypothetical... employee, who occupied the same role as the claimant and whose circumstances were otherwise the same or not materially different, save that they did not hold or manifest the claimant’s political opinion.”

Having established the hypothetical comparator, the tribunal was required to decide whether Morrison had been treated unfairly due to her political views. In all cases the judge found she had neither been harassed nor discriminated against.

For example, Morrison contended that a number of internal texts and emails sent between the BFF board and Michele Devlin amounted to discrimination and harassment, particularly a message sent in June 2023 by BFF Board member Mark Cousins to his fellow directors and Devlin. Cousins related his experience of being approached by Morrison in a bar where she:

“raised the subject to me of her speech at the trans-rally... I found the whole thing troubling for several reasons. (1) there seemed to be the suggestion that Michele of spreading false information; I told Sara that I had heard reports of her speech from several sources including other board members. (2) there was no hint of regret for, or doubt about, what she did. As you’ll know ‘I’m standing up for the rights of women’ is the argument used by conservatives and religious people in several countries, and a new staple of the anti-LGBTQ anti-Islamic right.”

Cousins went on to write: “I therefore feel that we need to accelerate the process by which this is sorted, if possible. Michele, as you know, on Friday, I’m supposed to present with you our pitch for the big Hearth project. Sara is named as part of the team for that project. I think her name should be removed pending the resolution of this. We can’t have an Inclusion/Diversity Officer who, many
weeks after making such an ill-advised speech, still stands by her actions completely.”

Employment Judge Sturgeon found this was not, as Morrison had contended, an implicit request to have her sacked because of her political opinions. Sturgeon sided with the BBF, stating: “The language used does not advocate termination of employment. The email seeks acceleration of a process already underway and proposes that the claimant’s participation in a particular project be
discontinued pending resolution of the matter. The words used are expressly temporary in nature... Accordingly, the tribunal rejects the claimant’s contention that the email constituted a call for her dismissal.”

The judge found that on the Belfast Film Festival’s action “were largely directed towards addressing stakeholder concerns, maintaining organisational operations and responding to issues which had arisen unexpectedly within a very small organisation.”

The BFF was mildly criticised for a series of events which saw Morrison being locked out of her staff email, removed from the BFF website and Festival programme and being asked to return her office keys, all whilst she was off sick. The email situation seemed particularly odd as Devlin generated a new password for Morrison but then sent it to the account she was locked out of. Morrison’s subsequent gmail telling Devlin she hadn’t received the new password was ignored. Several months later Devlin sent Morrison a new password inside a large file without drawing attention to it. This, the judge ruled, was “deficient”, but put it down to “administrative error, oversight and inadequate follow-through rather than any deliberate or targeted conduct towards the claimant.”

The removal of Morrison’s name from the staff website was found to be legitimate as it was part of the removal of the staff page from the website, and it was accepted that her removal from the Festival programme was purely because she didn’t work on the Festival that year, being off sick. The requirement to return her keys “was made in a practical and routine manner and was directly connected to the respondent’s operational requirements arising from the claimant’s absence.”

The claim for constructive dismissal was assessed by looking at the grievance process Morrison underwent whilst still employed and the events leading up to her resignation. “Viewed cumulatively”, the judge wrote, “the tribunal accepts that these matters would reasonably have caused the claimant considerable distress and may have contributed to her perception that the respondent was not adequately supporting her”. But “having considered the claimant’s perception, the surrounding circumstances and the reasonableness of the alleged effect in each instance, the tribunal is not satisfied that any of the conduct had the purpose or effect of violating the claimant’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for her.”

Game over

Or is it? Today Morrison said it was “disappointing that the Northern Ireland industrial tribunal has dismissed all of my claims against Belfast Film Festival. I disagree with the judgment and I am considering my options.”

She went on to say: “This case matters beyond me. It is the first time a Northern Irish tribunal has considered a gender-critical belief discrimination case. It will not be the last. I believe the tribunal got this wrong, and future cases will need to be judged on their facts.

“I would like to thank my family, who have been through this with me over the past three years, and in particular my mum and Ian. I want to thank my legal team, Naomi Cunningham, Dr. Charlotte Elves, Simon Chambers, Alistair Norton and Erin Stewart, who fought this case with everything they had.

“I want to thank the Free Speech Union, especially Carrie Clark, who supported me at the start of this journey when I had nothing, and everyone who donated to my CrowdJustice and has been with me every minute of the way. Without your support this case would never have reached a tribunal.

“Above all I want to thank the thousands of women and men who sent me their support, and in particular Maya Forstater, Fiona McAnena and everyone at Sex Matters, Stella O’Malley and everyone at Genspect, Women Won’t Wheesht, Freedom in the Arts, Graham Linehan, For Women Scotland, Murray Blackburn Mackenzie and JK Rowling...

“To the women who have fought this battle before me and alongside me, many of whom contacted me out of the blue to offer their support, on the worst days, hearing from you kept me going. To the women and men of Belfast and beyond, who stood by me, thank you. I owe you. Especially my wine friends.”

Belfast Film Festival have been approached for comment. You can read more about the case on my website - I suggest reading the introductory interview with Sara, the Week 1 round-up and a summary of the BFF’s closing arguments and Sara Morrison’s closing arguments. If you want some breathless drama, try the Recusal Special newsletter. Read the judgment in full, here.

An NHS doctor has been asked to “reflect” on the consequences of her decision to tear a cameraphone out of a videographer’s hand during a protest in Cardiff in April.

On Saturday 11 April several women’s groups banded together under the brand “One Year Later“ to mark the anniversary of the For Women Scotland Supreme Court decision in Cardiff’s Central Square.

Dr Sophie Quinney, clinical director of the Welsh Gender Service (WGS), joined a noisy counter-protest at the same location. Quinney took exception to being filmed and attacked the videographer responsible. You can read a fuller version of what happened, and find a link to the video of Quinney here.

Quinney’s behaviour was witnessed by a “retired health professional”, taking part in the One Year Later gathering. They complained about Quinney’s behaviour to the General Medical Council, the independent regulator for doctors in the UK. The complainant said it was “unprofessional for a doctor to be part of a group interfering with women’s rights to freedom of assembly and expression by trying to drown the speakers out and prevent them being heard.”

Send for Perkins

The GMC had a look at the complaint (and the evidence supplied). Molly Perkins, their investigations officer, concluded that whilst Quinney was “clearly there to support people on the Trans rights side of the two opposing groups, the video does not show her shouting or otherwise joining in with the disruptive actions of the group. She is mainly standing to the side leaning on a sign observing proceedings.”

Perkins acknowledges “the video does show Dr Quinney attempting to grab the phone to prevent her being filmed. This could amount to an allegation of assault or battery.” This was referred upwards to the GMC’s Assistant Registrar, who “referred to the guidance for decision makers on low-level violence, and found the guidance shows that this concern can be closed.”

The reasoning was as follows: “The events took place wholly outside Dr Quinney’s professional life. The violent act was limited to a
single act of trying to snatch the phone, No weapons, punches or other violent actions were involved, and no physical harm was done to the person filming or the phone.” The Assistant Registrar decided the evidence supplied by the complainant “does not show Dr Quinney to be a current or ongoing risk to public safety or confidence in the profession” and as she “has no previous history relating to allegations of violence” the investigation was over.

That said, the Assistant Registrar also felt it would “be appropriate for Dr Quinney to reflect on the issues raised by her actions. Allegations of violence are serious and could damage public confidence in the profession. Dr Quinney’s Responsible Officer (RO) will be notified of this concern, so that the issue can be reviewed locally as part of her appraisal process. If the RO identifies any further concerns during the doctor’s appraisal, these can be referred to us for consideration.”

Feet to the Fire

In July 2024, NHS Wales ordered a review of Quinney’s Welsh Gender Service in the light of the Cass Review, after a number of complaints made by the families of WGS patients. As of May this year that review still hadn’t started. The same month (with the help of a number of people) I was able to do some number-crunching which revealed that the Welsh Gender Service was referring people for gender surgery at around 3 times the rate per head of population as the wider UK.

The Welsh Conservative Health spokesperson Natasha Asghar was so concerned at this she asked a question in the Welsh Parliament and wrote to the Welsh Health Minister, Mabon ap Gwynfor, asking when the review of the WGS would begin.

Ap Gwynfor replied last month stating that he was “committed to improve gender identity services both for adults and for children and young people” and that the “NHS Joint Commissioning Committee (JCC) will soon undertake a service review of the Wales Gender Service to ensure the model of provision is in line with the latest evidence to inform future improvements.” He also told Asghar his officials “meet with the JCC on a monthly basis for update[s] on this work and other specialised services commissioned by the JCC.”

Asghar told me that “given the recent revelations about the Welsh Gender Service, it is abundantly clear that an independent review is needed into its practices and leadership. Whilst I am pleased that the Welsh Government has now confirmed a review will be carried out, it is imperative that it is thorough and gets underway urgently. I will continue to hold the Plaid Cymru Government’s feet to the fire over this important issue.”

I understand (possibly as a result of Asghar bringing it to the Health Minister’s attention), the review is now imminent, but it is not going to investigate individual complaints, and is unlikely to report before March next year.

This article may be better understood by reading yesterday’s report which also includes a backgrounder explaining how this case came to court: Sex Matters v CPS Day 1: Is the CPS Guidance on Sex by Deception Lawful or Not?

The following is a report of the second and final day of Sex Matters’ attempt to have the Crown Prosecution Service’s current guidance (the Guidance) for Prosecutors on sex by deception ruled unlawful. Today’s judicial review hearing ran for just over two hours. It started by allowing Clair Dobbin KC (who I last saw representing Gareth Jenkins at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry) to respond to the detail of Sex Matters’ claims that the Guidance is unlawful and so confusing it might lead to crown prosecutors making the wrong charging decisions.

(If you would like to read my live tweets from today in a formatted, time-stamped, fully searchable web-page, please do go to the live tweets on this website which records any live-tweeting I do in real time and then turns them into a lovely archive for your reading pleasure.)

Design for Life

Yesterday Sex Matters said that the more convincingly a trans person has concealed their sex, the more the onus on the them to ensure any likely sexual partner is aware of it. Dobbin said it is not for the Guidance to provide “a framework for living”. Its purpose is to guide crown prosecutors as to whether there might have been a criminal offence. Besides. the Sex Matters point is covered where the Guidance states “if you fail to disclose your sex or gender identity that might make you criminally liable.” Dobbin felt that was “the correct balance given the nature of this Guidance... it’s not there to act as some guide for how people should conduct themselves.”

Dobbin then addressed the central point made by her client, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who believes that gender identity is a reasonable and relevant consideration for prosecutors when it came to consent, sex and charging decisions. Dobbin pointed out there was no settled law in this area. She gave the example of a young (presumably passing) trans woman (to use her language) kissing a young man at a disco after dancing together, but not exchanging a word “in the way that young people do”. What consent has the young (possibly heterosexual, possibly not) man given in that instance? Has the trans woman committed an assault? Dobbin told the court: “We don’t know whether that would constitute a criminal offence”.

Dobbin said the Guidance was not making a direction one way or the other in a case like this. If it did “that might be an issue”. Instead it simply flags up that there are “situations prosecutors might be confronted with”, but the Guidance is not saying these cases should not be prosecuted.

No Sympatico

Dobbin took the judging panel (Dame Victoria Sharp and Mrs Justice Heather Williams) to several instances where the Guidance made it quite clear that deception as to sex, no matter how a suspect presented, was a potential criminal offence

Or in the precise words of the June 2026 version:

“Depending upon the circumstances of the case, a trans or non-binary person (including those who have a GRC and/or have had gender reassignment) may deceive a complainant as to their sex if they choose not to disclose that they are trans/non-binary, or if they make a deliberate false assertion or lie in respect of their sex and/or gender identity.”

What the Guidance could and should not do, said Dobbin, was describe the precise conduct or situation which could lead to a possible prosecution scenario (especially as there was no case law to lean on).

Dobbin read a couple more paragraphs to the court: “the test to be applied is whether the non-disclosure or representation is so closely connected with the sexual nature of the relevant act that it deprived the complainant of their freedom to choose whether to have sexual relations with the suspect” and “Evidence that the suspect failed to disclose their sex and/or gender identity may be
sufficient, depending on the circumstances of the case. But other evidence may be necessary.”

This was what should focus the mind of crown prosecutors, said Dobbin, and be taken into account.

Dobbin then moved on to another argument made by Sex Matters - that the guidance was so sympathetic to trans and non-binary people, prosecutors might be guided towards placing too much weight on a trans person’s unwillingness to divulge their birth sex or the fact they might truly believe they have changed sex.

She quoted another section of the Guidance which says: “even though the suspect fails to disclose their sex and/or gender identity they may reasonably believe the complainant consented due to: the degree to which the sex, trans or non-binary identity of the suspect is apparent”. Dobbin called this “common sense” - something which needs to be considered. She echoed the case of H and McNally when she brought up the example of a example of a person using a prosthetic device as a sex aid. Dobbin said it might be an offence in itself if it’s non-consensual, but if it’s said to be a penis and it’s not - that involves deception as well and it needs to be looked at in the round by prosecutors before they come to a charging decision.

Summarising her case as to content, Dobbin said the Guidance is “oriented towards specialist prosecutors. There is no clear case law regarding gender identity. [The Guidance] says a prosecution could be brought on the basis of gender identity. It allows for a fact-sensitive assessment. It’s making clear that not disclosing your sex or gender identity might be an offence... that reflects the law as it stands in a field in which there are no bright lines and a body of law that can’t be reconciled.”

Der Vine

After a short break, Sarah Vine and Chris Knight came back with their responses. Vine started by focusing on the DPP’s reliance on the case of H as an example of where gender identity came into play.

Briefly: H persuaded Woman B that she had had a phalloplasty and therefore despite being female, H was a man capable of penetrating Woman B with her “pseudo penis”. Woman B agreed to have sex with H on that basis. H had not had a phalloplasty and penetrated Woman B with something else (the exact object is disputed). When Woman B went to the police, H eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault (relating to cunnilingus) and one count of assault by penetration.

Firstly Vine accepted that gender reassignment surgery could be brought into play in a matter of sex by deception (as it was objectively verifiable), but then explained that the deceptions involved in H’s case were not about gender identity. The deceptions were:

- inducing Woman B into a fiction: “the lie she was in some non-corporeal way a man”
- that she “lived in a way that was consonant with that non-corporeal identity”
- that she had “undergone surgical modification” so her body resembled that of a man.

Vine said Woman B knew of H’s sex before these deceptions, therefore she knew that the two acts of cunnilingus were being “performed by a person she knew was a woman, performed precisely by the body part she was expecting in a form she was expecting. She knew she was engaging with a woman.”

Yet she was charged with sexual assault for those acts. Vine argued the deceptions being perpetrated by H were not close enough to act of oral sex to meet the criminal threshold. Gender identity was irrelevant. Consenting to be penetrated by one thing and finding yourself penetrated by another is different, but again, said Vine - this has nothing to do with gender.

Positively Hazardous Category Confusion

Whilst the ins and outs of a case which focuses on phantom surgical attachments are certainly interesting, Vine told Dame Victoria (who asked for the figure) that trans and non-binary people who have had gender reassignment surgery are just a tiny percentage of the overall population. It was no excuse for the CPS to be peppering its guidance with a self-reported state of being (gender identity) which can’t be reliably measured and was conflated throughout with sex. Vine said it was “positively hazardous” to introduce gender identity as a legal moving target “and to introduce it in such a way that it elides with a known quantity” - sex.

Vine drew attention to another area of the Guidance Sex Matters see as problematic - the idea that people can present as the opposite sex without it being a conscious deception. They may actually believe they are women, despite being men. Vine said the Guidance seemed to present this a get out, telling the court the DPP’s position “seems to suggest that a suspect does not commit a deception if that suspect’s definition of sex can be expanded to incorporate gender identity. That is a category confusion into which crown prosecutors cannot afford to fall.”

Vine said that almost every clause under the heading Trans and Non-Binary Experience in the Guidance “serves to undermine a suspect’s culpability... the tone of them is without further direction entirely consistent with a lowered culpability.”

Still Standing

Chris Knight spoke next to address the issue of standing (ie whether Sex Matters have the “standing” to make this judicial review). Knight addressed the Good Law Project’s failure to achieve standing in a legal challenge to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s guidance on single-sex spaces, a matter raised by the CPS yesterday. Knight said this was a High Court decision, and there were higher authorities at the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal which fell strongly in Sex Matters’ favour. He also said that the Good Law Project asserted a universal ambition to litigate “any form of public law error” - whereas Sex Matters had a specific and dedicated area of expertise in this precise area. “There’s no read across”, he said.

Knight then removed the issue of standing entirely when he pointed out that if Sex Matters case was strong enough to persuade the court there had been an error of law in the DPP’s Guidance, it would be against the public interest for their case to be dismissed on grounds of standing. Knight said it was open to the CPS to make the argument that if Sex Matters has no standing then whatever of the merits of its case it should fail, but he said no such argument was forthcoming as it knows such an argument is unsustainable.

Outside court I spoke to Maya Forstater from Sex Matters. She said “it’s been over a year for us to get here. Court is the only place where you get to have the arguments laid out patiently and tested against each other. It can’t happen on social media. And it clearly doesn’t happen within a public authority. So if we have to keep dragging them to court, we will.”

Addressing the fact that this is a lot of money to spend examining a crime which has only been prosecuted three times since 2024, Forstater said “It’s about consent. And consent is at the heart of this. Recognising that other people have rights and that however much somebody believes in their gender identity, it doesn’t remove other people’s rights. When you’re consenting to have sex with someone, that is the most intimate, important place, where someone else’s consent should not be confused or overridden”.

The judgment will be published online in due course.

PS For those who keep an eye on the comings and goings of the judiciary, Dame Victoria Sharp has already announced she will be retiring as President of the Kings Bench Division. Today she told the court “this will likely be one of my final cases. It’s been a huge pleasure to hear submissions of such quality and clarity in a difficult case, raising difficult issues. The bar is in safe hands.”

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A warm welcome to everyone who has recently signed up to the GenderBlog newsletter or become a paying subscriber to this substack. Judging by the timing, many of you may have seen the podcast interview I did with Connie Shaw from the Free Speech Union in which I shamelessly plugged the Gende…

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One of the bigger scandals surrounding gender treatment concerns the long term effects of both hormone use and surgery. A particular aspect of it was brought home this week at the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender(CAN-SG) conference by Elaine Miller - a self-described “fanny physio”.

Miller has a nice sideline in pelvic floor-based stand-up comedy and is also the woman who famously flashed her merkin at Nicola Sturgeon in the Scottish parliament’s debating chamber in 2022. Her account of the stunt and the planning which went into it is my favourite chapter in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht.

There is a serious side to Miller, as befits a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists . She has just finished an academic paper with Professor Ruth Parry from Loughborough University called the “Unwanted Effects of Transgender Related Hormones and Gender Surgery on Urinary and Sexual Functioning”. Miller presented this for the first time at the CAN-SG conference.

Odour Control

Miller’s initial interest in the subject was piqued by a spike in referrals in young female people presenting with incontinence at her clinic. They had symptoms which would have been “familiar with menopausal women” but they were happening “thirty years earlier”. All the young women were on cross-sex hormones, specifically testosterone.

Miller reminded the conference that continence problems can be devastating. “If you worry that you are going to wet yourself in public, it affects everything that you do, and everything that you think”.

People who suffer from incontinence tend to “stop exercising, stop being intimate with their partners and become very worried about odour control. They change what they wear... and their sense of self is impacted.”

Miller went looking for advice about incontinence in literature produced by gender clinics and “couldn’t find any information... funnily enough”, but what she did find was a study conducted in 2024 which stated that 69% of trans adolescents on testosterone reported pelvic pain. In other words, “the cross-sex hormones we’re giving young girls makes them sore”.

Some of the young people in that study reported that their pelvic pain was linked to sexual function. Miller said one female told the report’s authors “if she has an orgasm, she then has crippling pelvic pain... for three days.“

Miller decided to get together with Professor Parry (who is a physio herself and an academic specialising in systemic reviews in healthcare communication) to do a proper study into the physical therapeutic needs of people who have undergone transgender hormonal and/or surgical interventions.

Their study involved speaking to male and female adults who had transitioned (including detransitioners) and looked at other studies which may have useful information. “We were struck” said Miller, “about how little in the literature includes the voices of the people that are affected by this stuff”, so they resolved to ensure individual voices featured heavily in the study, even giving the people they spoke to sight of and input into their recommendations.

The Findings

Are not good. After vaginoplasty (an operation not for the faint-hearted), up to 15% of males reported incontinence with a further 5% reporting urinary problems (eg desperately needing a wee and having to drop everything to do so). 75% reported sexual dysfunction.

“That’s not a good outcome of surgery”, said Miller. “These are things which reduce somebody’s quality of life”.

For males who had not undergone surgery, 55% on prolonged oestrogen use reported “urinary leakage”.

For females the outcomes are worse. Up to 50% of women who undergo phalloplasty (arguably an even more gruesome process than vaginoplasty) are left with urinary incontinence. 54% reported sexual dysfunction. “This data is shocking”, said Miller. “But they’re carrying on. Chelsea and Westminster [NHS Hospital Trust] are training up new surgeons.”

Miller said she felt it was unlikely many of the younger women who were seeking phalloplasties knew much about sex (”they are disproportionately likely to be neurodiverse [and] socially awkward”) and therefore may not have properly understood what they they were signing up for: a so-called penis (in reality a tube of fat and skin harvested from their arms, stomach or legs, sewn into their genitals), with little idea of how to use it.

25% of females who elect for metoidioplasty (in which clitoral tissue is detached from the labia and ligaments around it are cut so it protrudes forward) along with urethroplasty (in which the urethra is rerouted through the clitoris to allow urinating whilst standing) report difficulty urinating. Some require help from “continence nurses” and end up “self-cathetising” because the surgery has caused strictures in the urethra, which means the bladder can’t be emptied efficiently.

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Shame and Stigma

Miller said their research found that gender clinics were largely “ignoring” the continence problems reported by their patients or weren’t accurately recording them. Miller felt there were parallels with the NHS mesh scandal where patients reporting pain were ignored by their doctors.

The headline figures might not represent the true scale of the problems trans people were facing. “Shame and stigmas is a big factor in these conditions”, Miller told us. “Even in a urology clinic people will minimise the symptoms they are experiencing, and we know that people with previous trauma under-report even more.”

Miller and Parry tried to find out if anyone had already looked at whether pelvic health physiotherapy might help people who were undergoing gender treatment. The available data was “really thin”, said Miller, calling this “a surprise, given how many of them are experiencing complications.”

After dealing with pelvic matters, Miller touched briefly on other rehabilitative failures after gender surgery. She noted that most women who received bilateral mastectomies due to cancer were routinely offered physiotherapy to prevent “post-operative shoulder dysfunction” - eg a frozen shoulder. There is, however, no NHS physio provision for women having their breasts removed for gender-related reasons. In fact, the surgical protocols say the arms should not be lifted above 90˚ for “anything between six weeks and six months“ after surgery. Miller said this was because the protocols were written by plastic surgeons who are basically just interested in the scar - “they’re concerned that if [patients] move an arm too much, the scar will widen and be less aesthetically pleasing”.

Miller said a disproportionate number of trans-identifying people seem to have persistent pain and chronic fatigue, but we don’t know why. A feature of any trans gathering is multiple mobility aids. Miller said “from a physio point of view, if you give somebody a mobility aid, you should have an exit strategy”.

And they should fit. “You don’t give them a wheelchair that you’ve bought off Argos that they’re all slumped in, that doesn’t fit their leg length.” Miller said when you see a group of trans-identified people together, their mobility aids are often “very jazzy and match the person’s outfit.” This suggests they’re purchasing them themselves “which means there’s no rehab plan”. Miller cited the example of a 23 year old she spoke to who had bought herself a wheelchair. She had no physio plan in place to get her out of it.

Miller said there were wider problem with gender patients in possession of physio referrals. Clinics can and do often refuse to take patients on the basis that - and Miller says she was told this directly - “we don’t treat gender here”. This, according to Miller, is because health professionals are “nervous” about taking on gender patients. “They don’t understand them, they’re worried about using the wrong words, and upsetting the person or being accused of a micro-aggression or worse.” This, said Miller, was not good enough. “If we wouldn’t reject a referral for a woman [with] pelvic floor disorder who’s been de-oestrogenised because she’s menopausal, we should not be rejecting young people who are de-oestrogenised because they’re on cross-sex hormones.”

It was, of course, a possible solution for gender clinics to offer their own physio, but some people with negative outcomes from gender treatment (especially detransitioners) might not want to go back to a gender clinic, so Miller and Perry advocate for physiotherapy in standard settings as well. This requires physiotherapists understanding the needs of gender patients and building therapeutic relationships within the trans community because “they don’t trust us”.

It might hopefully also cause the wider NHS, public and patients themselves to question the benefit of these treatments in the first place.

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This is Samantha Tempest. Tempest works for the civil service, and today at Leeds Employment Tribunal he was cross-examined by a barrister representing his ultimate employers, Defra (the government Department for Farming and Rural Affairs).

Tempest is taking Defra to court because they won’t ban the SEEN (Sex Equality and Equity Network) group from posting messages on the staff internal message board. Nor will they ban the group itself. Or stop staff from wearing SEEN lanyards.

You can read the tweets reporting Tempest’s cross-examination here – generated by the wonderful Tribunal Tweets.

Tempest wants SEEN banned because their very existence apparently seeks to erase his. And that is because Tempest is a man who thinks he is a woman. In fact, he is utterly convinced he is a woman trapped in a male body.

Tempest’s desire to have Defra dismantle SEEN does not extend to banning other staff groups like a:gender (the “Civil Service transgender and intersex network”) which campaigns to let trans-identified men go in women’s toilets or ceasing to celebrate the holy month of Pride, no matter how it makes other people feel. Tempest likes those things, so they can stay.

Little Girl Dresses

According to his witness statement, Tempest transitioned in 2015, after a near death experience in 2014. “The trauma of going through that changed something in me”, he says . “I realised that if I had died then, nobody would ever have known who I truly was. I couldn’t live with that anymore, so my decision to transition was made.”

The process ended his marriage and appeared to lose him most of his friends. Work, though, was a safe space. “There were a few other trans people in the same office building, and there was a sense that we weren’t alone.” Those trans people no longer work in the same building. Tempest is alone again.

Tempest claims he has faced rising hostility around him since the Forstater judgment in 2021, and the creation of SEEN in the Civil Service in July 2022, has stopped making him feel safe at work.

Tempest is insecure about his looks. “Testosterone shaped my body in ways that still make it feel foreign to me”, he says “I’ve done everything I can to make peace with it and make it feel like home. That’s why hearing colleagues use my appearance to mock me, suggesting I “prance around the office” in “little girl dresses”, feeling that even to respect my pronouns is to lie, has been devastating.”

Controlling the Terms

Tempest has harvested three examples of comments posted on the SEEN website and a civil service message board called Yammer. Those comments are:

– “Gender identity in the workplace forces me to lie.”
- “I can see the many great ways my career can progress…Why would we jeopardise that by forcing people to lie and pretend that biological sex doesn’t matter?”
– “We have now accepted the ideology of gender identity, something I see as similar to adopting the Christian faith of my grandparents without question, because they would feel distress if I didn’t.”

Of them, Tempest says: “These three comments frame my existence as a deception. It implies that acknowledging me as the person I say I am requires dishonesty. SEEN say they respect me but then how can they if this is how they feel? They talk about being authentic but when I present my authentic self, they view it as a deception to access women’s spaces. If my coworkers genuinely feel forced to lie simply to interact with me, how am I meant to believe they have my best interests at heart? It’s simply a direct attack on my legitimacy and my ability to set the terms on how people interact with me.”

This paragraph is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least the final clause of the last sentence. This claim and Tempest’s internal grievance before it is really about control – setting the terms under which people interact with him. Expecting them to have his best interests in their hearts. Me, me, me.

In fact the entire witness statement is drenched in so much whinging entitlement, it almost drips off the page. I was trying to read it sympathetically, but Tempest’s total lack of self-awareness and empathy for others makes doing so a struggle.

Being charitable – I can understand why he doesn’t like reading negative things about gender ideology at work. He argues “SEEN wouldn’t say these statements about sexual orientation”, without seeing why the analogy is different. Why would he? His trans identity is as important to his life as some people’s sexual orientation is to theirs. As he puts it, “why would anyone choose to lose friends and family and be rejected by society if it was simply a lie?”

And why, given his gender reassignment is a legally protected characteristic, can’t he therefore compel people to change their pronouns, wear little girls dresses and camp out in the women’s toilets?

Lanyards

I get that he’s not pretending, I fully accept he genuinely believes he is some form of woman, but the whole tenor of the statement smacks of a man whose belief is so shaky, he requires everyone to re-shape their reality around him, or the psychological supports which maintain his belief will crumble.

The witness statement contains more insight into his way of thinking.

On biological reality:

“I am aware that the a:gender network organised a survey which found that 87% of respondents considered the statement “sex is binary and immutable” to create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment… These findings are consistent with my own experience.”

On lanyards:

“In relation to SEEN lanyards and badges, the Respondents contend that these do not put anyone at risk. My lived experience is that encountering colleagues wearing SEEN lanyards in the workplace makes me feel unsafe. I have altered my behaviour as a result, avoiding certain areas and being fearful of how SEEN members might behave towards me at work. This is a tangible and direct impact on my working life.”

On SEEN itself:

“I am aware that the Respondents contend that SEEN’s existence does not amount to harassment. Again I disagree. As I have made clear throughout, I respect the right of other employees to hold gender critical beliefs. My complaint has always been about the manifestation of those beliefs in the workplace and the Respondents’ [ie DEFRA’s] failure to protect me from the harm that has resulted. The existence of a network whose fundamental tenets deny the reality of transgender people’s lived experience, operating with the formal support and recognition of my employer, creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for me and other transgender colleagues.”

It is interesting that Tempest says he is “aware that other government departments, such as the Met Office, have refused to recognise departmental chapters of SEEN, on the basis that doing so was necessary for the prevention of harassment of trans colleagues… I consider that Defra’s decision to recognise and support SEEN stands in contrast to the approach taken by other departments”. I did not know this was the case (it may not be), but it suggests elements of the civil service are still struggling with reality.

I have published Tempest’s witness statement in full here on my own website.

Tempest’s mission to force everyone to see the world from his perspective has already had some success. Both Defra and the supposedly neutral tribunal panel in Leeds have announced they will refer to him with female pronouns, and they haven’t quite made clear what pronouns they are expecting Naomi Cunningham nor her client Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley to use when she is cross examined. The tribunal has made a decision which Cunningham has asked for in writing, as she wants to understand it properly. This tribunal is due to last another two weeks (and I think I’m right in saying Tribunal Tweets intend to cover it all). More as we (or they) get it.

On 1 June a man called Darren Rigby was sentenced to two years and four months in prison for sending threats to three all-girls schools on Merseyside.

In emails sent across the space of a week in January this year, Rigby told one school he was already “inside... hiding with a sword and crossbow”, claiming his intention was “to injure and kill as many girls as I can”. He said anyone who “tries to stop me will also be shot”.

In another email he wrote: “I am on my way to the school with a revolver and a machete and I’m going to shoot and stab all of your girls. You terfs are going to learn to stop mocking, deadnaming and misgendering transwomen like me. If anyone attempts to stop me, they will be shot and I will release a blood agent into the school which will poison you.”

In an email to the third school, Rigby said he was “going to kill every girl and woman staff member I come across”.

His threats were hoaxes, but they had to be taken seriously. Security protocols were implemented. Teachers reported distress amongst pupils and parents, some of whom were asked to come and collect their children.

After a police investigation, Rigby pleaded guilty to three counts of sending communications threatening death or serious harm. On the day of his sentencing at Liverpool Crown Court, Merseyside police sent out a press release neatly omitting Rigby’s stated trans identity, his “misgendering” animus and the fact his proposed victims were all female. Although the BBC apparently had more than one reporter in court, its online write-up dutifully followed the police’s lead.

Lopez is Seen

We might have been none the wiser, had journalist Jamie Lopez not been at the same sentencing hearing. Lopez reported the content of Rigby’s emails in his 3 June article for the Southport Lead, titled “Hoax attacker threatened violent assault on school attended by child survivors of Southport murders“.

The disparity between the Southport Lead’s report and the BBC effort was immediately picked up by SEEN in Journalism, who noted Rigby had committed a “crime of extreme misogyny in the cause of ‘fighting trans oppression’ but any mention of ‘trans’ has been erased... In addition the BBC report hides the fact that it was a crime against women and girls.”

SEEN’s highlighting of the BBC’s omissions crossed the Atlantic. Rigby’s Merseyside Police mugshot was published by Reduxx, the US news site, in a piece called “UK: Trans Activist Jailed for Sending Death Threats to Schools for Women and Girls“. SEEN’s thread also motivated a number of people in the UK to complain directly to the BBC. One wrote:

“It is an inconvenient truth that there’s a sector of trans rights activism that hates and targets woman and girls for harassment and aggression. I believe the BBC lies by omission about the actions of trans-identifying men because it has taken a side in the debate about what rights these men claim, and does not want these men to look ‘bad’. If I’m wrong, and you’re not biased, and it’s just sloppy journalism, please amend the article to tell the whole story.”

Another wrote:

“The link between terrorism and violence against women and girls is well known now, and the focus of this story should surely have been the man’s targeting of girls, and the police’s decision to erase that aspect from their report. Women and girls will continue to suffer if police and the media make such effort to erase the sex-based choice of victim in cases of male violence and threats like this one. It is also a growing scandal that both the police and the BBC, as captured institutions, conceal so many instances of trans-identified men’s criminal activities.”

She finished with an appeal: “There needs to be an enquiry into the influence of an extremist fringe belief system on the BBC’s news output and lack of journalistic rigour in this area, and the disproportionate involvement of representatives of that belief system in editorial decisions.”

Thanks to the Southport Lead and SEEN in Journalism, the BBC’s journalists were busted.

JK Rowling Gets Involved

On 17 June, a lengthy apologia was quietly added to an “updated” BBC report on Rigby’s crimes.

The BBC told its readers: “This article was originally published without including key details about this case, due to miscommunication between BBC reporters in court and the writers. We have updated the article to explain that these threats were directed at three all-girls’ schools, related to the “misgendering” of trans girls and that Darren Rigby identified in one threat as a trans woman. We have also included further details from these communications which referred to TERFs, targeting female pupils and staff and included threats to use bladed weapons, a crossbow, a revolver, and poison.”

It concluded: “We apologise for the failures in our reporting.”

I saw the apology for the first time yesterday evening and tweeted it out, adding my own commentary as I went. This was amplified by a number of people, including JK Rowling, who called it “An essential thread on the BBC and the internal battle being waged over truth versus ideology”.

Thank you, Jo.

The story might now be out there, but the explanation provided by the BBC doesn’t add up. The apology said the “failures” occurred “due to miscommunication between BBC reporters in court and the writers”. So there was more than one BBC reporter in court? What had they been instructed to do? What did they do?

Bluntly, Mr Burke

Two of the individual complainants to the BBC kindly shared their correspondence with me. Both received an email from Tim Burke, the Head of Complaints “for BBC Local across England”. Burke told his correspondents that by the mere act of “writing to you, you might appreciate the gravity with which I take your complaint”.

Burke offered a little more than the published explanation for the BBC’s decision to leave out newsworthy details about Rigby’s crimes. “The omission of this information from the original version was a reporting failure”, he wrote. “It arose because relevant material heard in court was not incorporated into the first published version of the story, which was written from a police press release and a court check... Having asked the team for a full explanation I do not believe information was deliberately withheld. Without going into the full detail there were a series of communication failures which should never have happened, but which I believe were made in good faith.”

So now we know BBC online got their info from a distorted and misleading police press release, but we still don’t know what the “BBC reporters” (plural) were doing in court, nor do we know where the BBC got its “updated” information from. An agency/external news source? The Southport Lead? A BBC reporter’s notebook which had been lying around for two weeks?

The mystery deepens when we consider the bulletins running on Radio Merseyside on the afternoon of 1 June, which, whilst ignoring the trans/misgendering elements of the story, quoted Rigby as saying “I’m going to kill and injure as many girls as I can” - a phrase which did not appear in the police press release, and was only reported by the Southport Lead two days later. This suggests that at least one of the BBC reporters inside court was filing for broadcast or there was some, as yet, unidentified agency copy floating about somewhere. I have not yet seen how North West Tonight‘s evening bulletin on 1 June dealt with the story as it’s no longer on iPlayer.

Back to Burke. Last week he told his correspondents: “Frankly, and bluntly, you make many valid points in the issues you raise. The original article fell materially short because it omitted important details concerning the grievous nature of the threats, the fact the schools were all girls’ schools, Rigby’s references to the alleged mistreatment and misgendering, in his view, of trans women, and the considerable impact the threats had on pupils, parents and staff. Those details were relevant to understanding the case and should have been included in the original report... we accept that the omissions were misleading by their absence. We are very sorry for that.”

Burke also said there had been an “unacceptable delay” in changing the report and that the BBC “will be carrying out a further review into how those failures happened.”

(UPDATE: This evening the BBC press office has told me that on 1 June they had one reporter in court in the morning, one in the afternoon (hence the plural “BBC reporters” in the 17 June update) and it was from their notes that the changes to the article were made three weeks later. Unfortunately they won’t give any more details on the “internal processes” which caused the alleged balls-up, but assured me the matter was being “taken very seriously”. They stressed the failure was a result of “genuine, unintentional mistakes” and made themselves hostage to fortune by telling me “we will be taking action to ensure these mistakes are not repeated.”)

It’s In The Culture

Both complainants who contacted me noted the BBC’s “corrected and expanded” (in Burke’s words) Rigby report has not yet been tagged as a “Trans” story. They consider this to be further evidence the BBC only put stories in its trans category if they are good news about trans people, rather than unpalatable ones.

Nonetheless, without evidence of a positive decision to elide crucial details from the Rigby story, we may have to accept the BBC’s incomplete explanation of what went wrong.

Unfortunately the BBC has form in lying to its audience on trans issues, or making “omissions... misleading by their absence”. That is an organisation-wide cultural problem. If the concerns of women or the dangers of trans ideology were considered sufficiently important within the BBC, it would be investing resources in making damn sure it gets their stories right first time. Time and again the BBC has failed to report the truth, preferring instead to report trans activists’ idea of the truth, because it can’t or won’t confront the issue.

This sits within a wider cultural willingness to gloss over the misogyny which drives a lot of trans-identifying men along with a general lack of interest in female safety. As Jo Bartosch wrote, Rigby “threatened schoolgirls in the language of trans activists, with the same complaints about misgendering and exclusion that still pepper the policies of many British institutions. Is it any surprise that, from the BBC to Merseyside Police, there was such reluctance to join the dots? To do so would have meant confronting the uncomfortable possibility that an ideology they regard as inclusive had supplied a misogynist with both his grievance and his justification.”

Reading about the experiences of Cath Leng or Rob Burley - two former long-term BBC staffers who are now free to talk - it is almost unarguable the BBC has gone deep into a phase of incredibly damaging institutional capture over gender ideology. To paraphrase Sall Grover - if an organisation is prepared to lie (or mislead its audience) about the reality of something as fundamental as sex, why should you trust it to tell the truth about anything else? No institution is immune to reality. Those which seek to deny it will eventually crumble.

There are hopeful signs. The very fact the BBC was prepared to offer an almost unreserved apology about its reporting of the Rigby case suggests that it understands this is a hotly-contested matter of significant cultural importance. Indeed, a BBC journalist contacted me today to assure me “things are definitely changing. Pro gender/trans stories come under scrutiny now. They have to be run past editors. Things are really improving. The tide is turning.”

Let’s hope so. The BBC still leads the national conversation. It has a responsibility to get things right. With Rigby, it got it badly wrong.

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Two people in the last four weeks have persuaded me to do more writing on substack. One of them works for substack. The substack lady was aware of my work on the Post Office scandal, but not aware of my work on gender. The other person is a very committed gender warrior and thought I would attract more paying subscribers via substack than my website, substack being more of a known quantity.

Once I told the substack lady I was more interested in using her product to write about gender, she kindly spent a good half hour taking me through the various ways I could give it crack, including cross-posting news items from my GenderBlog website.

Given that I try to make everything I write free at the point of consumption in order to find the widest audience possible, I have been persuaded makes sense to offer my GenderBlog posts (or selections from them) up on another platform. So here, tentatively, I am.

The main driver of eyeballs to GenderBlog is that twitter. The vagaries of and changes to the X algorithm mean I never know when the eyeball tap (there’s an image to play with) might be switched off. At the moment X remains an important source of both reach and revenue, but only a fool puts all their eggs in one basket.

I am hoping that with minimal extra effort I’ll be able to operate on two platforms, an act of judicious hedging, should an internet billionaire or government decide they want to arbitrarily wipe out either platform.

To reassure everyone who supports my work, I don’t think opening up a front on substack short-changes anyone. A subscription to GenderBlog is essentially a donation which allows me to keep “doing” journalism, rather than provide anyone with exclusive access to it.

That said, subscribers who donate via my website are automatically sent the GenderBlog newsletter and I have just realised I should probably also cross-post my GenderBlog newsletters to paying substack subscribers.

At the moment my paying substack subscribers currently total exactly one, so I can just forward them the GenderBlog newsletter without too much palaver. If I get any more I’ll work out a way of sending newsletters direct from substack just to paying subs as a perk for being lovely and generous and supporting free-at-the-point-of-consumption public interest journalism.

If anyone thinking of making a donation cares about the distinction, the GenderBlog newsletter is a chattier thing than my GenderBlog website posts, which tend to be newsier. This article (the one you are reading now) is probably more like the style of my newsletters, whereas my last substack article, about the magnificent For Women Scotland, is newsier, and an example of the sort of stuff I plan make freely available on substack going forward. Anyone can read the newsier stuff on GenderBlog for free anyway. They just have to find it.

Newsletters also contain a lot more personal opinion, rumours and heads’ up of stuff which may or may not be coming down the line.

If you are lovely and generous and feel you’d like to take out a paid sub to my work on substack, I would dearly like to have you on board. I’m sure, as I begin to divine its mysterious ways, I will find out how to offer exciting perks to paying subscribers. At the moment I don’t even know how to link to the paying subs page. (UPDATE - found it!)

Subscribe now

If you can’t afford a paid sub, I would fully understand. I pay monthly subs to a number of stackers and always wish I could afford more. Hopefully the quality of what I’m doing will begin to persuade some people. But free subscribers are very welcome too! All I would ask is that if you think I’ve written a good story, please share it either internally on substack or wherever you like (eg X or LinkedIn or even bloody BlueSky). It is supposedly an effective way to drive growth.

If you have any questions for me and have received this article as an email, I think all you have to do is hit reply. If you are reading this on the substack app or website there must be a fairly easy way of messaging me. If you find it, tell me. Failing that you can definitely send me a totally secure email via the contact page on the GenderBlog website.

Thanks for reading this far and thanks for your support. Lots to come in the future, I hope.

Yours,

Nick

The Scottish government’s policy of putting men in women’s prisons has today been ruled unlawful. A judicial review found in favour of the campaign group For Women Scotland, who argued the current Scottish Prison Service policy of taking into account a prisoner’s gender identity was dangerous and wrong.

Today Lady Ross, sitting in the Outer House Court of Session (Scotland’s equivalent of the High Court), ruled that “sex segregation in prisons in Scotland is lawful” and there is a “justification for maintaining sex segregation in prisons.”

She ruled that “trans prisoners have rights... but this does not extend to a right to be accommodated in a prison for the opposite biological sex.” There was no “positive obligation” for the state to do so , and therefore “in all the circumstances, the Prisons Guidance is unlawful.”

Reacting to the ruling, Susan Smith from For Women Scotland (pictured in green above) said “We are delighted to have won such a comprehensive victory in our judicial review on Scottish prison policy. All the arguments from the Scottish Ministers were comprehensively rejected by the court... We should never have needed to take this case and we hope this will be the last time that we are forced to go to law to defend the rights of women. Ultimately, this is a victory for the very vulnerable women in the prison estate.”

You can read the judgment in full here. A Scottish Prison Service spokesperson said: “We are grateful to Lady Ross for her judgement, which we will carefully consider, at pace, along with the Scottish Government. It would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.”

For Women Scotland are Marion Calder, Susan Smith and Trina Budge (right in the photo above). In April last year they achieved a seismic Supreme Court victory which anchored the legal definition of men and women in biological sex. Despite the legal requirement for sex segregated prisons, the Scottish government and the Scottish prison service maintained it was lawful to continue housing male prisoners who identified as women in the female prison estate.

Marion Calder from FWS (pictured on the left) told me she would be “raising a glass of something cold this evening. While thinking of the women who have been deeply damaged by the illegal policy. Our thoughts are with them.”

In February, FWS took the matter to judicial review in a three day hearing at the Outer House in Edinburgh. Some of the legal arguments made in court can be read here:

Day 1: For Women Scotland back in court
Day 2: Dawn of the Intervenors
Day 3: Suicide is Shameless

There are known to be seriously violent men in the female prison estate in Scotland. They will now have to be removed.

Wiggle Room

Despite the comprehensive nature of the ruling there is potentially a bit of wiggle room. The issue of suicidality came up a lot in the judicial review hearing - the idea that trans prisoners may take their own lives if they are unable to be incarcerated according to their gender identity.

In today’s ruling Lady Ross said “It is possible that, in an exceptional individual case, in a situation where there is a threat to life through suicide, it may be necessary to consider an argument that accommodation in a prison for the opposite biological sex is necessary.” However, she continued, “whether that could be achieved compatibly with the requirements of the Equality Act cannot be determined in the abstract.” She intimated any such circumstance “cannot form part of a general policy”.

Trina Budge told me she was “delighted with the ruling and we hope to see the remaining male prisoners in the women’s estate moved immediately”. Budge also wondered if “the Scottish Government will consider doing the decent thing and compensate the women affected for the trauma they have suffered.”

Today’s ruling is another landmark moment for an extraordinary group of women who have now achieved a series of important and lasting legal victories. Understandably, Susan Smith said FWS were “incredibly grateful” to their “brilliant legal team ... we’ve been promising them a lunch to celebrate ever since we won our first Judicial Review in 2022. Perhaps we will finally get the chance!”

The Scottish government and the Scottish Equality and Human Rights Commission (who intervened in the judicial review) have been contacted for comment.

Jonni Skinner is a 23 year old detransitioner from Michigan. I met him at the Life Beyond Transition conference in Washington DC earlier this year. Jonni spoke on a panel about his experience of being medically transitioned and the harm done to him as a result. Jonni’s recent testimony has gone viral on a couple of occasions. The first occasion came from 4 November last year during a Michigan House of Representatives Oversight Committee on Child Welfare. Jonni sat with his mother as they both answered questions for more than twenty minutes.

The clip which went viral was when Jonni listed the side-effects of the puberty-blocker, androgen-suppressant and cross-sex hormones he was given as a child. Jonni told the hearing that whilst on hormones he had “terrible muscle spasms, muscle atrophy... I started peeing blood.” He was also developed “spontaneous ulcers in my bladder with no pathology present, so they didn’t know why they were forming. I also had issues with sexual dysfunction at the time. Many, many intimate dysfunctions. Breast pain and fluid leakage... I used to leak so much fluid I would have circles on the outside of my shirts.” When Jonni raised this with his gender doctors, they told him it was a normal part of “womanhood”.

Jonni told the hearing that despite coming off hormones (in Dec 2023 aged 21), he has urinary incontinence and still leaks fluid from his chest, with “pain in my breasts as well as bone issues. I have bone that’s growing in my joints and my current doctors don’t understand why. They’re seeing these bony protrusions form over the past year and a half since I stopped hormones... and I still have sexual dysfunction.”

The second occasion Jonni went viral was on 7 April this year when he spoke at a California Senate Judiciary Committee hearing against Senator Scott Wiener’s bill (SB934) to ban conversion therapy (a subject due to become a live issue in the UK). The occasion was interesting as much for Wiener’s apparent discomfort during Jonni’s testimony as it was for the (powerful) two minute statement Jonni made.

During his speech, Jonni told Wiener he was a "feminine" child who discovered trans influencers online who led him to believe his life would be better if he took hormones and underwent surgery. If he didn't his life would get "worse. Or as the doctors told my mom, I would commit suicide."

Jonni told Wiener how gender care specialists “poisoned my body with blockers and hormones, arresting my puberty and messing with my development. The result: I’m a 23-year old gay man who has never had an orgasm and may never have one. Let that sink in... SB934 guarantees that more people will end up like me, the walking but wounded. I could have been spared all of this if any of my therapists explored why I felt dysphoric, but they never did. They only led me to hate my body more... this Bill is an attempted workaround that will be used to silence therapists who could have helped me avoid the irreversible harms to my body and the loss of my sexual function.”

“I think I might be trans“

I caught up with Jonni over Zoom earlier this week. What was meant to be a 40 minute conversation went on for more than two hours. He is good company, smiles a lot and, in his own words, retains a “lightness of spirit”, but in reality, his life to date has not been great. He describes his demeanor as a way to “cope... because I wouldn’t really have the positions that I’ve been able to get if I was just crying all the time”.

Jonni started our interview by describing his childhood growing up in a small town in Michigan. He told me how he loved the colour pink, was attracted to make-up and liked holding hands with boys. Jonni told me adult members of his own family called him a “faggot” and church pastors tried to “pray the gay away”. Although his mother, Melissa, did her best to protect him, Jonni was severely bullied. His own, small rural community made it quite clear there was something wrong with him, and Jonni internalised this. As a result he was a withdrawn and quiet child.

Jonni was on the cusp of puberty when American culture went peak affirmative trans. There was a butch lesbian in his community, hired to help tutor Jonni with his maths. To escape the homophobia she was experiencing, she had begun to transition. At the same time Jonni was watching lots of male make-up influencers online, some of whom, like Gregory (now Gigi) Gorgeous and Stef Sanjati were also transitioning. They were telling their followers how much more authentic and real it made them feel. It had en effect. Jonni was eleven when a television series about Jazz Jennings (a boy who had been socially transitioned by his parents aged 4) was first screened. In February the following year he told his mother “I think I might be trans”.

Melissa decided the best thing to do was to take him to see a medical professional who could help him work this through. On 12 May 2016 Jonni was taken to the Gender Services Program at Michigan Medicine, which is affiliated with the University of Michigan Hospital. Over four hours he unburdened himself to Sara Wiener, the program manager, who was warm, welcoming and accepting. Her notes record “Jonathon” stating “he has always identified as a girl and his earliest memories of his gender included believing he was a girl from 2 years of age. When adults in his life told him he was a boy, he ‘suppressed’ his female gender identity. At the age of 5, he was struggling to continue to suppress his female gender identity and this led to thoughts of suicide.”

Wiener also wrote: “He reports disliking most of his body, particularly his Adam’s Apple, his hands and feet because they are larger than a girl’s hands and feet, and he dislikes the amount of hair on his body. He would like a higher voice, ovaries, a vagina, and breasts. He becomes upset when he looks in the mirror because his body does not align with his female gender identity. He denies plans to hurt himself but he reports he ‘wouldn’t be upset’ if he died.”

Wiener recommended Jonathan as suitable for cross-sex hormones after that single appointment.

Lady Brain Theory

Jonni was put into the care of Dr Daniel Shumer, an endocrinologist who is currently Medical Director of both the Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic and the Comprehensive Gender Services Program at Michigan Medicine.

In his first meeting with Shumer (as Jonni remembers it) Jonni and his mum were told that all embryos are female at conception, and the early chromosomal message to switch to male is accompanied by a wash of testosterone which sets the embryo on a male developmental path going forward. Jonni’s brain had evidently not received enough testosterone in that chromosomal switch and he therefore had a female brain in a male body. “He explained being trans is an inherent, almost neurological intersex condition, and there’s no cure for it... a brain condition.”

The best thing for it was to align Jonni’s body with his brain by putting him on a cocktail of hormones to prepare him for eventual gender affirming surgery (Jonni says by his second appointment, Shumer was already talking about an orchiectomy and feminising facial surgery). Jonni had found the scientifc answer he was looking for, but Melissa was alarmed at the suggestion of medicalisation. Jonni remembers Shumer lowering the temperature by saying to Melissa: “Well, if you’re not a supportive home, we could always step in and find one.”

I asked Jonni how his mum reacted. He said: “there’s some men in my family that had fought in Vietnam and whenever I ask them about it, they get this like look on their face where they just go blank... and that was kind of like her expression.”

To complete all the tropes, Shumer allegedly also told Melissa that 60% of kids who are not allowed to transition take their own lives, inferring that medicalisation was the best chance Jonni had. Trying to resist it either meant having her son being taken away or responsibility for his likely death.

Melissa stepped quickly into line. Thirteen year old Jonni left the consultation thinking: “Oh, this is going to save my life and I can finally be normal.” He immediately changed his pronouns and around a year later adopted a new name, Scarlet, chosen by his mother from a list he presented her.

Jonni was put on spirolonactone to whack out his testosterone and then a course of oestrogen. In 2017 he was given puberty blockers (histrelin, also known as Supprelin) via an implant in his arm. He progressed to puberty as what he called an “estrogenized male”. Jonni developed “small b-cup breasts” and urinary incontinence (haematuria). He did not go back to school in his home town, beginning an itinerant lifestyle, travelling with Melissa for her work, as she effectively homeschooled him.

Eventually they settled in a more populous, liberal area (still in Michigan) and Jonni began his freshman year at high school. After years of abuse at elementary and middle school for being effeminate, he was given hell at his new school for being trans. “I had a few friendships with some girls that I met, but I was bullied a lot. And of course, I had my medical complications that were not helpful because I would like have accidents in class... so I wasn’t very popular in school.”

That was the year he started peeing blood. “You’ll see this in my medical records. My endocrinologist tried to say that it was only one episode of haematuria that resolved itself, but it was ongoing to the point that I missed out on pretty much my entire freshman year of high school. I started the year, and then I couldn’t finish it because I was in pain and I was in the hospital so much.”

The damage being done to Jonni’s body was self-evident, but the doctors would not relent. Melissa fought to get the puberty blocker implant taken out of Jonni’s arm. Within weeks of its removal weeks Jonni’s haematuria stopped. By this time the implant had been sitting in his body for more than eighteen months. To replace it Shumer prescribed more spirolonactone and a course of medroxyprogesterone. Medroxyprogesterone acetate is used in the chemical castration of sex offenders. It was this which Jonni says started his “chest leakage”.

Jonni did not complete his sophomore year. As soon as he was 16 he dropped out and took up a series of jobs waiting tables, hosting at restaurants, helping with yoga classes and working as a barista whilst studying for his General Education Development certificate. Jonni found it reasonably easy to pass as a woman and found trans friends at the liberal end of his local scene, but he was not happy. He had never considered himself a woman and never wanted to be a woman. He just wanted to fix what society wouldn’t accept about him and blend in. But now he was trans. Aged 17, he confronted Dr Shumer about this in a phone call. Jonni told Shumer that his friends talked about “trans women being so discriminated against, and all of that. And I’d be like, why would you make me a part of a discriminated class and lead me to believe that I would be more normal and more accepted? I’m not. Why would you tell me that?“

I asked Jonni how Shumer responded. “All of the concern in his voice went away. He was very monotone, and he was like... you were 13, so if there’s anybody to blame, it’s you because you chose this, and he hung up on me and I have never heard from him again.”

Detransitioning

Detransitioning was “very gradual process” for Jonni. After he turned 18 he started dating “a lot” of men. Some were porn-sick weirdos. Some were older (”much older”) with a bit of money, often divorced, who would claim they were heterosexual. The older men “would at least take me out, and would want to be seen in public with me”. The others were “just gross”. Jonni found it “physically very painful to get aroused, and I didn’t really have a drive for it. I just wanted to cuddle and talk and they wanted to be intimate all the time.”

As well as being disillusioned with his medical “care”, Jonni was not politically aligned with the trans scene where he lived. He could see the pitfalls of medicalising children and saw himself as different from the autogynephile men who suddenly declared themselves to be women and expected to be treated as such. Jonni was, in his words, “true trans”, born with a brain condition which made him that way. Expressing these distinctions was unwelcome.

At the age of 21, after discussion with the endocrinologist who replaced Dr Shumer, he decided to take time out from the hormones. “I finally just stopped. I was like... maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to surrender to mother nature and see what happens. Worst case scenario, I could always retransition.” The same month, Jonni made tentative contact with Genspect, an organisation which helps detransitioners, founded by the psychotherapist Stella O’Malley.

In March 2024, the WPATH files were published. Jonni was aghast. “I started going through them and it was absolutely horrific. Some of the callousness that I was seeing from these doctors, like how they so casually would discuss sterilising their patients. I couldn’t fully understand everything in there, but from what I could understand, it definitely reflected some of the care that I had received at the University of Michigan.”

Jonni started doing more research into the transitioning of minors and the physical castration of young men. “I was like, what the fuck? I started to... it shifted my perspective. My self-concept that I had around being born in the wrong body had been slowly coming undone over the past months prior, and this just shattered it. I was like, oh, so you mean I was just lied to.”

Jonni describes the reading he did into gender medicine was like “having the blinders ripped away from me. It completely shut the doors to retransitioning. And that’s when I began to realise I was severely, severely misled.”

An Identity in Flux

Jonni asked if Genspect would interview him for their “Wider Lens” podcast series. The result is a fascinating interviewconducted by Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad, a Licensed Professional Counsellor. It was published on 24 March, three weeks after the WPATH files leak. Jonni is a study of an identity in flux. He is still going by his adopted name, Scarlet, and using female pronouns. He tells Stella and Sasha “most people who know me, call me she“, but is relaxed when people call him “sir” at work. “I don’t feel now... as adverse to my birth name”, he says, “I just think it’s an unattractive name... but it doesn’t evoke any catastrophic dysphoric emotions or anything, because it’s just a name.”

Two years later, Jonni would be interviewed by another detransitioner, Soren Aldanco, again for Genspect. This time round he is calling himself Jonni and presenting as a gay man.

Whilst Jonni was detransitioning he started a long battle to get hold of his medical records from Michigan Medicine. When he finally received them in January 2025, he found they contained some troubling untruths, including what Jonni alleges is an entirely fabricated story about wanting to cut off his penis as a young child as (he apparently said he thought it was “a ‘growth’ that did not belong”). This was written into Jonni’s notes by Sara Wiener. The notes also reveal that the 13 year old Jonni’s initial diagnosis was for an endocrine disorder alongside gender dysphoria. Jonni did not have an endocrine disorder. When I ask Jonni why these oddities might have appeared in his notes, he is at a loss to explain Michigan Medecine’s motivations, speculating it might be “manipulation and money, probably.”

I pushed him on what he meant by this, and Jonni reflected. “This whole clinic was very strange, you know? Now as an adult, I look back on some of the conversations I had with the endocrinologists... The whole thing was totally inappropriate. It was a process of grooming, 100%.”

Jonni is still considering what legal routes to redress he might have. He explained how difficult that can be in the US. He is also still in pain. “I need my bones looked at as I am still developing new masses. My urinary incontinence is still very much a daily thorn in my side, despite years of physical therapy it hasn’t gotten much better. And I still have sexual dysfunction that isn’t being addressed either. I think most doctors just don’t know what to do with me.”

Jonni’s currently doing a lot of “yoga and meditation”, which is about properly integrating the mind and body whilst also strengthening his “psychological resilience”. He’s also making a living the part-time manager of a clothing store and periodically helping out at a local holiday rental company.

Ambassador Skinner

In March this year Jonni agreed to become Genspect’s first ambassador. When I ask him what that actually means, he says he wants to use his “first hand experience of living through paediatric transition to educate the public on what the actual experience is like, beyond all the affirmative fluff we typically hear from medical activists.”

He also wants “kids like I was” to be able to have “the space to grow up without an external influence making them feel as if their body is inherently wrong and needs correcting. I really can’t think of a worse thing to tell a child or vulnerable adult.”

Stella O’Malley says Genspect are lucky to have Jonni on board. She calls him “one of the most beautiful souls I know. He combines warmth, eloquence, and a gentle strength that draws people in. There is a steadiness about him, a strength and dignity, that has carried him through.”

Jonni has never left the United States, but that might change. The UK government has committed to a ban on conversion therapy, which some campaigners feel could end up outlawing non-affirmative gender therapy. Jonni’s powerful personal testimony certainly had some impact when he spoke out against Scott Wiener’s bill in California.

I ask Jonni what he’d say if he was invited to address Westminster legislators. He says he’d tell them that a conversion therapy ban “will seal the affirmative model of gender affirming care into law [and] only serve to create more kids like me, with ongoing medical problems due to hormonal interference during development. Children and adolescents need time to grow and cultivate life experiences to form a solid identity. Interfering with that by telling them their body is wrong and needs correcting will only serve to derail them. Conversion therapy is a horrific practice and gender-affirming care serves as the modern ‘new face’ of these abusive practices”.

I contacted the University of Michigan, Dr Daniel Shumer and Sara Wiener, asking them to address the points made by Jonni above. I received a response from Michigan Medicine saying “to protect patient confidentiality, we cannot provide any information about specific patient care.”

I am grateful to Jonni for his time and permission to publish some of his personal family photos. I hope he continues to get stronger.

Once more, for reasons I don’t quite understand, I have gained a whole new (and welcome) tranche of followers on Substack. I love Substack. Some of my favourite writers are on it. I have an account. This is it. But I don’t use it much.

That’s essentially accidental. Around the time Substack was getting going (back in the late 2010s) I was experimenting with crowdfunded blogging. In 2018 I created a blog called postofficetrial.com. Then in 2022, with the help of Andrew of the Dark Arts (his real name), I created a website called reportingdeppvheard.net. Then in 2023, Andrew and I put together a website called postofficescandal.uk and, most recently, in 2024, we developed a website called genderblog.net

I am still spending most of my time writing for postofficescandal.uk and genderblog.net

If you like my work or just followed me here for fun and might want to find out more about me, I would be deeply grateful if you would consider going to the post office website or the gender website (the Depp v Heard one is dormant atmo) and donate to join the newsletter fun there. I would be beyond delighted if you would consider making a one-off donation to a) get on the mailing list and b) fund my work.

You are obviously entirely welcome to follow me here on Substack, but I can promise you at the moment I have no plans to write any posts about anything other than to persuade you to have a look at my work on GenderBlog and Post Office Scandal.

I don’t feel like I’ve persuaded you. You like Substack. I get that. I feel like we’re now having a stand-off. You don’t want to go to the other websites and I don’t want to write for this one. We are both standing opposite each other, 30 yards apart, narrowing our eyes (or just squinting in the sunshine).

Something’s got to give. Go on. Go the other websites. See what you think.

Alright, whatevs. Thanks for following. However recently you did so.

I am grateful.

xN

However. If you would like to view my current work, I am active on that twitter/X (@nickwallis) and I have two active blogs, one on gender and one on the Post Office scandal.

If you are in the mood, I also have two books available, one on the Post Office scandal (with a new one out in 2026) and another on Johnny Depp. Whilst trying to find out if I did indeed have a substack I found this interview I did in 2022 on journalism and the Depp trials with the outstanding substacker , one half of the truly inspiring podcast.

I may write more stacks in future. Thank you for your attention.