News of the Cass Review’s damning indictment of NHS England’s treatment of children with gender issues has finally reached Scotland. On Thursday, the Sandyford clinic – aka the Tartan Tavistock – announced that it has paused all prescribing of puberty blockers to vulnerable children.
Yet it’s not just clinicians who have told children they were ‘born in the wrong body’, and that harmful medical intervention will be necessary for the rest of their lives to make them right, says the writer, author (and member of the FSU’s Writers’ Advisory Council) Gillian Philip for Spiked. She continues:
One of the guiltiest parties in the entire sordid affair of the mythical ‘trans child’ has been the children’s publishing industry.
Supposedly reputable publishing houses have for years been churning out propaganda for trans ideology, from the grotesque Welcome to St Hell, featuring a woman-hating diagram of one of those ‘wrong bodies’, to jolly picture books like Grandad’s Pride and Grandad’s Camper, with their not-so-child-friendly illustrations of mutilated, breastless women and old blokes in bondage gear.
Then there’s the prizewinning Jamie by LD Lapinski, a hearty endorsement of ‘harmless and reversible’ puberty blockers for middle-grade readers.
Before June 2020, I was a successful children’s writer, one of a team employed by the book packager, Working Partners, to write for manufactured series like the Erin Hunter animal fantasies and the Beast Quest brand. That June, I tweeted ‘#ISTANDWITHROWLING’, when JK Rowling first intervened in the gender debate by questioning the renaming of women as ‘people who menstruate’.
The subsequent Twitter mobbing that took place over 24 hours resulted in my summary sacking (with no attempt to get my side of the story).
I was then fired by client HarperCollins, who thereafter pretended not to know me, despite hosting me on media tours in the US on multiple occasions and professing themselves over the moon with my work. My agent, Julia Churchill, dropped me too, ensuring I would never write for a major publisher again.
That was the power of the trans lobby in the children’s book industry, even when that lobby consisted of nothing more than anonymous trolls who objected to my backing of JK Rowling, and who expressed that objection with explicit and brutal threats of death and rape. For children’s publishers – with some courageous exceptions – to be so cowardly and gullible is a betrayal of the principles that any good writer wants to convey to young readers. It is also a disgrace that will linger.
Worth reading in full.
