An Angel Gets His Wings
Update 488. Chloe Cole Special. #BeMorePorcupine
This is a long one, dear readers!
Thanks to reader Tenaciously Terfin for the upcoming Christmas films and first up is It’s A Wonderful Life.
I am concerned that, if I even gave an outline of the plot, I would blow the whole thing - so I won’t. I’ll just say we are in Back To The Future territory! Even though the scene below is the end of the film, even if you haven’t seen it I don’t think it will give that much away.
James Stewart is George Bailey, Donna Reed is his wife Mary, Todd Karns is his brother Harry, and little Zuzu is played by Karolyn Grimes. And, though not present whilst being centrally mentioned in the scene, guardian angel Clarence Odbody was played by Henry Travers. An uplifting 1946 film, no doubt much needed one year after the end of the Second World War!
Thanks as ever to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
Skrmetti
I last reported on this US Supreme Court case here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-spitfire-squadron-2a3
Excellent summary of the proceedings from Bernard Lane on his substack, Gender Clinic News. Personally I would have referred to trans-identifying female advocate for the (awful) ACLU as Ms Strangio rather than Mr Strangio. Leaving that to one side, the most bonkers thing is that Ms Strangio is arguing largely on the basis of sex discrimination! Didn’t you previously think that sex was not immutable, Ms Strangio!!??
Rebirth of sex
Trans litigators recruit the reproductive binary to woo the Supremes
Dec 09, 2024
The US Supreme Court heard oral argument last week in the case US v Skrmetti, a challenge to Tennessee’s law SB1, which prohibits gender medicalisation of minors with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgery.
These are my impressions.
The carrot
Among Tennessee’s challengers is “John Doe,” a 12-year-old girl who takes puberty blockers and identifies as a boy. She says: “I’ve gone through a lot to finally get to the happy, healthy place where I am, and I desperately hope that doesn’t all get taken away from me.”
That happy, healthy place is the carrot dangled by “gender-affirming care.”
In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, after listening to challenger-in-chief US Solicitor-General Elizabeth Prelogar, Justice Samuel Alito nibbled away at the carrot—
“[C]an I ask you a question about the state of medical evidence at the present time? In your petition, you made a sweeping statement, which I will quote: ‘Overwhelming evidence establishes that the appropriate gender-affirming treatment with puberty blockers and hormones directly and substantially improves the physical, psychological well-being of transgender adolescents with gender dysphoria’.
“That was in November 2023. Now, even before then, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare wrote the following: They currently assess ‘that the risks of puberty blockers and gender-affirming treatment are likely to outweigh the expected benefits of these treatments,’ which is directly contrary to the sweeping statement in your petition.
“After the filing of your petition, of course, we saw [the] release of the Cass report in the United Kingdom, which found a complete lack of high-quality evidence showing that the benefits of the treatments in question here outweigh the risks.
“And so, I wonder if you would like to stand by the statement that you made in your petition or if you think it would now be appropriate to modify that and withdraw the statement that there is overwhelming evidence establishing that these treatments have benefits that greatly outweigh the risks and the dangers.”
Unlike the chorus of gender-affirming clinicians in various countries, Ms Prelogar didn’t pretend that the Cass report had little relevance outside the particularities of the UK health system. Nor did she seek to undermine the systematic evidence reviews that drove more cautious treatment policy in Sweden and the UK. Instead, she implicitly abandoned the high ground of her “overwhelming evidence” claim and retreated to the low-grade assertion of “a consensus that these treatments can be medically necessary for some adolescents.”
If other judges have delved into Baroness Cass’s April report, they like Justice Alito will know that an expert consensus is the weakest form of evidence, and that a pattern of circular referencing in treatment guidelines internationally has created the misleading appearance of a gender-affirming consensus.
Justice Alito, a legal conservative, did chide Ms Prelogar for hiding away Europe’s shift to caution—
“In your opening brief, you did not mention any of these European developments [involving greater caution]. And in your reply brief, is it not true that you just relegated the Cass report to a footnote?”
Ms Prelogar did not contest Justice Alito’s account of an end to routine use of puberty blockers by England’s National Health Service and a legislative ban imposed by Britain’s Conservative government and then reaffirmed by the current Labour administration.
Her fallback position was that, unlike Tennessee, Europe’s jurisdictions had not imposed an outright ban (in the UK, it’s a matter of live debate whether or not a clinical trial of puberty blockers can be ethical). “Each of the medical authorities in those states has called for an individualized approach to care,” Ms Prelogar said. “They’ve said it shouldn’t be routinely applied.”
How treatment can be successfully individualised has not been explained. The Cass review made a study of the gender dysphoria treatment guidelines used around the world, and noted their reassuring insistence upon multidisciplinary teams in gender clinics. Yet, Cass concluded, those same treatment guidelines betrayed “the lack of any consensus on the purpose of the assessment process.” If some adolescents stand to benefit from these medical interventions, how are they to be identified?
The stick
“Do you want a live trans son or a dead cis daughter.”—catch phrase of gender-affirming clinicians.
Back in court on Wednesday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, put the question: “Some children suffer incredibly with gender dysphoria, don’t they?”
Ms Prelogar: “Yes. It’s a very serious medical condition.”
Justice Sotomayor: “I think some attempt suicide?”
Ms Prelogar: “Yes. The rates of suicide are striking.”
Ms Prelogar also claimed that gender-affirming care reduced “suicidal ideation and suicide attempts,” whereas Tennessee’s ban would “increase the risk of suicide.”
Later in the hearing, Justice Alito returned to this theme—
“A lot of categorical statements have been made this morning in argument and in the briefs about medical questions that seem to me to be hotly disputed, and that’s a bit distressing. One of them has to do with the risk of suicide. Do you maintain that the procedures and medications in question reduce the risk of suicide?”
Chase Strangio, counsel for the ACLU and a transgender-identified female, replied: “I do, Justice Alito, maintain that the medications in question reduce the risk of depression, anxiety, and suicidality, which are all indicators of potential suicide.”
Justice Alito: “[O]n page 195 of the Cass report, it says: ‘There is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce suicide’.”
Mr Strangio: “What I think that is referring to is there is no evidence in some… in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide. And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”
“However, there are multiple studies, long-term, longitudinal studies that do show that there is a reduction in suicidality, which I think is a positive outcome to this treatment.”
Mr Strangio said nothing about the quality of evidence in those studies. And the conflation of suicidality—thoughts of ending one’s life, for example—and suicide attempts is a feature of the manipulative advocacy of the ACLU and many trans rights activist organisations.
At one point, Mr Strangio ventured an unexplained criticism that the Cass review had “only looked at studies up until 2022.”
He didn’t get a chance to elaborate, but probably did not have in mind the first and only rigorous test of the “transition or suicide” formula, published in the British Medical Journal in February this year. This Finnish study of actual suicides in youth gender clinics found that suicide risk was driven by the psychiatric problems of these patients, not by gender distress, and there was no evidence that hormonal and surgical interventions reduced the risk of suicide.
No clown fish in court
In the Tennessee case, Mr Strangio’s pitch to the judges relied on the unambiguous binary of biological sex. Suddenly, sex as a category was no longer nuanced or complicated—it was taken for granted as a bedrock biological reality. Why? Because there is legal precedent for arguing that a law discriminating on the basis of sex demands “heightened scrutiny” by the judges. And heightened scrutiny means it’s more likely that the courts will strike down such a law for infringing the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Framing Tennessee’s law as discriminating on the basis of nebulous trans identity did not offer this forensic advantage.
The full piece is here:
https://www.genderclinicnews.com/p/rebirth-of-sex?publication_id=627677&r=1v403b
Ireland - The Founder of The Countess stands for the Seanad
Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if Laoise de Brún was in the Seanad!!
Laoise de Brun / Wiki Commons (R)
Maria Maynes in Gript News (The Countess founder amongst those in bid for TCD Seanad seat 09 December) reports:
Founder of women’s rights campaign group The Countess, Laoise de Brún BL, has announced her candidacy for the Trinity College Dublin panel in the upcoming Seanad elections.
There are a total 16 candidates running for 3 TCD Seanad seats. They are Abbas Ali O’Shea, Derek Byrne. Kevin Byrne, Hazel Chu, Tom Clonan, Laoise de Brún, Hugo MacNeill, Marcus Matthews, Aubrey McCarthy, John (Jack) Mulcahy, Paul Mulville, Ade Oluborode, Sadhbh O’Neill, Lynn Ruane, Ossian Smyth, and Katherine Zappone.
Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish parliament, comprises a number of panels. Of the 60 senators, 49 are elected and 11 are nominated by the Taoiseach. Of the 49, six are elected directly by university graduates – three from National University of Ireland graduates, and three from University of Dublin (Trinity) graduates. A Seanad election must take place within 90 days of the Dáil being dissolved – which was done on the 8 November ahead of the general election. Polling for the Seanad election takes place in January.
The election of Senators can fall under the public’s radar, because only a portion of the public receive a vote, for only a number of seats available.
Ms de Brún, a barrister and campaigner, speaking to Gript about her campaign, said: “Trinity Senators, including Senators Norris and Robinson, have challenged orthodoxy and, in so doing, made this country a better place. Their advocacy work for gay rights and women’s rights respectively helped redefine who we are, for the better. There has never been a more pressing need for independent Senators who are unafraid to challenge the status quo and speak up for the most vulnerable.”
Ms de Brún’s gender-critical organisation has risen to prominence in recent years over its advocacy against the 2015 Gender Recognition Act, which introduced a self-ID approach to gender recognition in Ireland.
She added: “Without any funding and from outside the chamber, my work stopped the government from removing the word ‘woman’ from maternity legislation. I led a grassroots campaign that delivered the historic defeat of the Referendum last March. I have campaigned successfully against the hate speech element of the hate crime bill and the indoctrination of children into gender ideology in the classroom. Imagine what I could do inside the chamber, as your Senator.”
“Trinity gave me the confidence and the critical thinking skills to question the world around me. It is this foundation that drives my commitment to speak out, stand up for the vulnerable, and work towards a better Ireland. If elected, I intend to address delays in services for children and the policy of fully suspended sentences for guilty pleas on domestic violence and possession of child abuse images.”
Author Helen Joyce has endorsed the Countess founder’s run for the Seanad. She described the Countess as a “grassroots organisation with a consistent voice and vision that owes everything to Laoise’s leadership.”
This is the last time that the University of Dublin constituency will elect three Senators to the upper house of the Oireachtas. From 2026, Trinity graduates, along with graduates of The National University of Ireland (NUI), will elect six Senators to the Seanad’s Higher Education constituency.
The current University of Dublin Senators are Tom Clonan and Lynn Ruane. David Norris retired in January 2024.
The University of Dublin constituency has existed since 1938, and in that time notable Senators for the University have included former President Mary Robinson, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington and former Minister Shane Ross.
The full article is here:
For Women Scotland - Update
Update on UK Supreme Court: The Definition of Sex in the Equality Act (10 December)
First of all, a massive thank you to all the brilliant women and men who have supported us, the case, and who travelled from near and far to sit with us in court.
We were really pleased that the case generated so much interest and that we had so much press coverage! We've tried to capture as much as we can here:
https://forwomen.scot/22/10/2024/uk-supreme-court/
Our KC, Aidan O'Neill, has kindly given permission to publish his speaking notes, both for the first day of oral presentation in court and his final remarks at the end of the second day. These can be found here, along with links to the Supreme Court's video recordings of the proceedings:
https://forwomen.scot/29/11/2024/uk-supreme-court-the-hearing/
The court is now considering the evidence and it may be several months before we hear of its decision.
We are also waiting on the final fee notes from our legal team and we estimate that we are still a few thousand short of the total needed and, of course, there may be a remedy hearing in due course, so we will leave the CrowdJustice page open for a while longer.
Leeds University Student Cancelled
Excellent interview on Andrew Doyle’s Free Speech Nation with brave student Connie Shaw. Best of luck to Connie.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152830355
Clinical Trials On Children
EDI Jester discusses the appalling suggestion (which, unfortunately arises from the Cass Review) that there should be clinical trials of puberty blockers on children.
Boycott M&S
Thanks to Rex Landy for this one:
Enterprise Rent-A-Woo!
In his amazing journey on Matt Goodwin’s substack through captured organisations James Esses arrives at Enterprise Rent-A-Car!!!
Driven to Woke: How Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s been captured
A whistleblower from Enterprise Rent-A-Car leaks internal documents to me
Dec 09, 2024
Founded in 1957, Enterprise Rent-A-Car is one of the largest car rental companies in the world, with over 9,500 locations in nearly 100 countries. It also happens to be the largest car rental company here in the UK. Which is exactly why I was intrigued when I received an email from a whistleblower within the UK division.
The whistleblower has asked to remain anonymous, citing fears regarding Enterprise’s “feral legal team” that would be waiting to pounce. I was further told:
“The US corporation pushes woke onto its long-suffering UK employees. It's also having to shut our traps at work even at the most simple of businesses like car rental, while a clique of idiots in our HR teams mandate nonsensical language use and prioritise trans-identified customers and colleagues above all else. Can't we just come to work and rent out cars?”
I was then sent a variety of emails and documents that, crucially, had been sent by senior leaders to all UK employees. While you might have hoped that a company specialising in renting cars was more likely than others to be immune from the woke mind virus, I’m afraid to tell you this is not the case. Much like Jaguar’s breakdown, it appears that the car rental industry has also been ideologically captured.
As I worked my way through the leaked materials, they pivoted between the ridiculous and the dangerous.
Things began quite gentle. For example, Enterprise ran a ‘Bi Visibility Bake Off’, I presume on the assumption that bisexual people are not visible enough? The winning cake, of course a hugely important corporate occasion, was announced to all staff members, who were told that it “beautifully embodied the spirit of the event”.
Another email shared a ‘DEI Calendar’ with staff members, so they know when to celebrate “Omnisexual Visibility Day” or “Pansexual Pride Day”. So far, so expected. Much of this is now, unfortunately, standard in corporate life.
But the next document I opened was a guidance document for staff, entitled: ‘What’s in a pronoun’. This was more sinister, with staff told:
“Adding our pronouns to our email signatures, social media profiles and stating them at the start of meetings is a simple step cisgender people can take to enable those from the non-binary and transgender communities to feel more seen and recognised. We’d like to encourage you to do the same and on your social media profiles where you can”.
Labelling employees ‘cisgender’. Placing pressure on them to use gender pronouns. They even went on to state their desire that a “virtuous cycle” will take place. This is the very definition of the cult-like virtue signalling that, sadly, we’ve now come to expect from major corporations in our national life.
One of the most worrying documents is Enterprise’s ‘Transgender Toolkit, designed for “helping employees transition”. However, this isn’t ‘transition’ in the sense of transitioning to a job promotion or moving to different parts of the business. This is ‘transition’, as in “changing gender”.
From the outset, senior management make it clear that they will come down on staff members like a tonne of bricks if they are not ideologically compliant.
Particularly chilling is when they are warned that “there will be zero tolerance” for “purposely ignoring someone’s preferred pronouns”. Employees are forced to adhere to a set of beliefs on pain of punishment. This is abuse of power.
The policy document goes on to say that “all employees are permitted to utilise the facilities which align with their gender identity”, meaning that female staff members can expect to find men in their spaces.
The full piece is here:
New Zealand - Resist Gender Education
Excellent NZ group Resist Gender Education have put a press statement out on their substack.
Press statement
Responding to changes announced today in relationships and sexuality education.
Dec 10, 2024
Resist Gender Education welcomes the Education Review Office’s recommendation that the Relationships and Sexuality Education curriculum be reviewed.
We also appreciate Minister Erica Stanford’s announcement of the removal of the current RSE Guide by the end of the first term next year. This Guide presents ideological beliefs as if they are facts and parents around the country will be as relieved as we are to see it gone.
“We look forward to the development of a new curriculum that does not teach children that sexist stereotypes are what determine a person’s sex or that girls can have a penis”, said RGE’s spokesperson, Fern Hickson.
Although the ERO Report contains much useful information about the education needs of students in this era of online abuse and pornography, it also perpetuates some of the confusion and misrepresentation that has led to the current crisis and parental loss of trust in the content of RSE lessons.
Instead of investigating the beliefs being taught in schools to check their scientific accuracy, ERO has accepted “gender identity” – the concept that we all have a gendered soul independent of our sexed bodies – as fact and, worse, routinely conflates it with sexual orientation. Throughout its report, ERO incorrectly uses the term “gender identities and sexual identities” as if they are the same thing.
“Sexual orientation is not an identity,” explains Hickson. “And gender identity is not a sexuality. It is a belief system that teaches young gay and lesbian people that if they don’t fit sexist stereotypes, they are really the opposite sex and ought to modify their bodies to match the stereotypes.”
Although gender identity ideas are highly contentious and a wide range of people oppose them, including many gays and lesbians, ERO chooses to frame parental opposition as coming exclusively from religious conservatives or anti-transgender advocacy groups.
ERO reports that 87% of parents support RSE being taught in schools and there is general agreement that it is beneficial for students to learn about consent, relationships, contraception, bullying, managing feelings and emotions, and personal safety, including online safety. Division comes over the topics of “gender identity, different sexual identities, and gender stereotypes.”
As one parent put it, “Parents want to know why their daughters want to wear breast binders and escape puberty when just 10 years ago that was not a thing. Parents suspect that school lessons asking 7 year old girls to contemplate if they could be in the wrong body if they enjoy climbing trees or doing maths, could, in some cases, have something to do with this. That’s why parents are worried.”
The ERO report claims that gender identity is not being taught in primary schools, ignoring the fact those words appear in the RSE Guide for teachers at every single year level. It also claims that the RSE Guide does not “include guidance to instruct students how to change sex”, yet one of the suggested teaching topics in Science at intermediate level is to “consider variations in puberty, including the role of hormone blockers”.
“Most of the opposition to the current RSE Guide is because it introduces gender identity beliefs to five year olds and reinforces that ideology every single year,” says Hickson. “Resist Gender Education, in accord with the majority of parents, wants RSE to continue in our schools. We simply want the curriculum and guidelines to be rewritten so that they are scientifically factual and age-appropriate.”
“We are hopeful that unscientific gender identity beliefs will be removed from the draft topics to be announced early next year and that the new curriculum and guidelines will focus instead on the content that we can all agree on - understanding concepts like consent, boundaries, and respectful interactions.”
The States - Chloe Cole
Wonderful detransitioner, Chloe Cole responds on the substack Reality’s Last Stand to an outrageous article in the woo woo New York Times ( as someone commented recently, ‘it used to be a newspaper’). This was over a year ago but I have only just had it brought to my attention.
We’re Not Going Away: My Response to the New York Times Hit Piece
Our numbers will soon be too large for the New York Times to dismiss as a “few stories of regret.”
May 17, 2023
Yesterday, New York Times reporter Maggie Astor published a hit piece about me in an attempt to undermine my story and the testimonies of other detransitioners. Now that I’ve had some time to process everything more completely, I’d like to address some of the inaccuracies and falsehoods that Astor wrote about me—beginning with the disingenuous title, “How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care.”
I take issue with Astor’s flagrant use of the word “regret,” which implies a benign mistake like a bad tattoo—something I wasn’t even allowed to get until I turned 18 last year. No, I was a child when I was misinformed and misled by adults, who convinced me to permanently alter my body.
I learned through social media when I was 11 about boys and girls being trapped in the “wrong body”—an impossibility that should never have been “affirmed” by doctors. I was told by health professionals whom I trusted that I had a medical condition that required medical treatment. Not only that, but my parents were emotionally manipulated by being presented with a false dilemma—“would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”—despite the fact that suicidality is routinely overexaggerated in trans-identified youth.
Astor relies on the euphemism “transition care” when she means “chemical and surgical sex change services.” This is neither medically necessary nor lifesaving, but rather elective, cosmetic, and experimental.
Astor also flipplantly refers to my detransition as “changing course,” implying I merely took a wrong turn instead of having doctors affirm my confusion with experimental medicine. She says I “returned to my female identity,” but being female is not an identity. It is a biological reality that describes half the human population. It is something I never stopped being despite the fact that when I was 13-15, doctors prescribed me puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgically removed my breasts to try to mold me into something that superficially resembled a boy.
Astor neglects to mention the vocal European detransitioners and how European medical societies have backed off of “gender-affirming care” after conducting systematic reviews of evidence and finding that the risks outweigh any purported benefits. She also referred to outdated statistics on detransition which include studies on adults rather than the cohort I belong to—adolescents under the “gender-affirming” model of care. These studies also had serious methodological flaws and a high loss to follow up rate.
Another statistic she likely referenced was from a study about detransitioners that specifically excluded detransitioners. Participation in the study was limited only to those who had detransitioned in the past but still identified as trans–in other words, not people like me.
If Astor had researched the topic properly, she would have discovered a recent US-based comprehensive review of medical records that found 30 percent of teens and young adults had discontinued “gender-affirming” hormones after 4 years. Another US study from this year that challenges the notion that detransition is rare found that 29 percent of youth changed their requests for hormone treatment, surgery, or both. And yet another study from a UK primary care practice found that 12.2 percent of those who had started hormonal treatments either detransitioned or documented regret, while the total of 20 percent stopped the treatments for a wider range of reasons. The authors of this study observed that the detransition rate in emerging research brings forth crucial concerns regarding the possibility of “overdiagnosis, overtreatment, or iatrogenic harm,” similar to issues encountered in other areas of medicine.
A 2021 study found that three-quarters of detransitioners did not report their detransition to their providers, thus potentially creating a false impression that they were satisfied with the “care” they received. Norway’s health authorities confirm that detransitioners updating their providers is “not a given.”
It is not true that there are only a few vocal detransitioners in the US. Many have spoken out online, but only a few have the time to travel and testify. It’s not easy to open yourself up to an onslaught of criticism, blame, and hit pieces from the New York Times. It’s not easy to go public with details of your private life.
There have been many instances of detransitioners getting overwhelmed from the response to their story and deactivating their social media accounts. Hundreds more reside in support groups and remain anonymous, not wanting the stigma and negative attention.
Lawmakers shouldn’t have to restrict sex changes to adults, but US-based medical organizations are not doing their job at following the science. If they would conduct systematic reviews of the evidence, they would likely come to the same conclusions as European countries, which have heavily restricted medical interventions for minors and specific psychotherapy as the “first line of treatment” for teens in distress over their bodies.
US-based guidelines ignored an entire body of research that found the majority of children who do not socially or medically transition will no longer experience gender-related distress in adulthood. Instead, most of them grow up to be gay or lesbian adults.
Pioneers of the evidence-based medicine (EBM) movement said the current guidelines for managing gender dysphoria in adolescents in the US are “untrustworthy” and not evidence-based.
Astor took a shot at me for the detransition rally I helped organize in March, but our event was exactly how I planned. My heart hurts every time I see a new detransitioner come out, but soon our numbers will be too large for the New York Times to dismiss as a “few stories of regret.”
Support Chloe Cole by donating here.
Endpiece by Liz
#BeMorePorcupine
#LetWomenSpeak
#Grassroots Army
#GenderIdeologyIsEvil
#SaveFreeSpeech
Dear readers
Just a heads up that there is a premiere from Mr Menno this evening at 21.00 GMT namely an interview with Michael Foran in the wake of the Supreme Court case.
I will also be hopefully producing the next update this evening including some VERY GOOD NEWS!!!!!!!
Dusty
Thanks as ever Dusty, lots of good pieces. 🤞for the Skrmetti case and our Supreme Court case. Do you think Ms Strangio was named because of the stuff she says?
Good luck to the Countess.
How on earth can trials of puberty blockers be even considered. It’s barbaric and totally unnecessary. We’ve known about the harmful effects for decades and the only possible ‘benefit’ is for males to pass as adults. 🤬 Inother words, purely for cosmetic reasons. If Wes Streeting passes this, he’ll deserve all the disdain and disgust coming his way.
Love the bells Liz.
#BeMorePorcupine
#DontRentQueerCars 😁