Children love fairy stories, but reframing thieves and alleged sexual deviants as those fairies is grotesque
Since the recent Supreme Court judgement ensured very simply that woman in the Equality Act was understood to mean “biological sex” and a “biological female” the trans sympathy machine has been working serious overtime.
The outpouring of grief from “gender identity” supporters, at a simple clarification of the precise meaning of a woman’s sex has verged on collective narcissistic collapse, with declarations of impending genocide and mass suicide. Alongside their declarations of total despair have been physical demonstrations of rage, violence and destruction of public property which seem much at odds with any professed vulnerability.
The prevailing narrative still held aloft like a torch by mainstream media outlets has been one of evil women, supported by a corrupt justice system wielding cruel power over a weak and vulnerable population of men.
I was contacted this week by a woman in Hunter’s Bar, Sheffield to express her outrage at the window display of Rhyme And Reason, a small independent children’s bookshop there, which sits opposite a primary school and a large park. The retail footfall includes hundreds of small children a day. The display in question is full of pink and blue “trans” bunting and books promoting gender identity ideology to children, such as “The Pronoun Book” and “Being a Super Trans Ally”. It is a political statement at a crucial political time, which is of course the right of any retailer, however unwise or unattractive to their customer base.
The transgender status of the men is prioritised, rather than the violence they have committed
However, prominently displayed, was a list of 23 names of men under the heading, “The middle chain is to remember just some of the people in the UK who have been murdered for being transgender”.
Below this were statistics on “trans suicide” which said,
“92 per cent of trans young people have thought about taking their own life;
84 per cent of trans young people have self-harmed; and
45 per cent of trans young people have tried to take their own life.”
These are damnable lies. There is no way to talk about lying in a more palatable way and especially if those lies are being told to children.
The trans suicide narrative, which is dangerous in the extreme, creates fear in parents who are then unable to successfully help their children navigate challenging mental health conditions or neurodivergence such as autism and ADHD. Professor Louis Appelby has denounced such narratives and hosted on the government website, in the aftermath of the Cass report, is a strong request that bodies desist from such dangerous untruths.
It is a phenomenally dangerous and irresponsible act to host such statistics in a space where many vulnerable young people will see. Suggesting to toddlers that there is an increased likelihood of suicide and or being murdered, if you are a man who says he is a woman, is unfathomably pointless.
More worrying even than this perhaps, is that on close analysis of the list of the “murdered” men, the lies become still more repugnant. Many of the men were not murdered at all.
Vicky Thompson for example, a fully intact male without a gender recognition certificate, was correctly housed in a male jail as all men should be, with or without a GRC. Reporting focuses heavily on how Thompson had a history of traumatic life experience and was further traumatised by being placed in a male jail.
However, Thompson, in jail for committing a string of thefts including a violent street robbery, was under investigation at the time of his death for three sexual offences. The information about his “tragic” death by hanging, overshadows any mention of the crimes he had committed or was accused of.
Regardless of any of this, he was not killed because he was trans since he was not killed by another person at all. It is not heartless to say so, but it is cruel to lie to children about him and offer him as an example of saint rather than sinner. Children love fairy stories, but reframing thieves and alleged sexual deviants as those fairies is grotesque.
The list also contains the names of various other men who were not killed at all, and certainly not because they were “trans”. Natasha Romanov drowned after a night out, his death declared by police as having no suspicious circumstances and at least five others on the list also died with no suspicious circumstances evident.
Leeze Lawrence was a convicted drug dealer who was found dead by friends, possibly of a drug overdose. Lawrence, once lauded by Nicola Sturgeon, was also notorious for misogynist tweets such as “I’d kick you in the vagina, but I don’t want to lose my shoe” and racist comments such as “can we not export our gypsy’s [sic] back to Ireland, has anyone told them they can grow potatoes again”.
Many others on the list were not murdered and there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding their deaths. Jenny Swift, for example also took his own life. Swift was in prison on remand and about to be charged with attempted murder for stabbing a man in the street.
In the case of Neil “Penny” Port, his son was charged with murder after his death. Neil, a former boxing coach, had allegedly gone to his ex-wife’s house in anger after she called him a “pervert in dresses”. He found two of his sons there instead of his wife and the younger of the sons stabbed Port in the ensuing argument. The son, Neil Port Jr, maintained the defence that he was protecting his younger brother from his father and a jury therefore delivered a manslaughter verdict. These circumstances are obfuscated from a list where “poor penny” is murdered for “being trans”.
Available online reports have to be meticulously combed through to strip the abundant sympathy from the scant and well-hidden truth. The transgender status of the men is prioritised, rather than the violence they have committed or the deviant behaviour characteristic of their lives. Some of these men killed other men and their stories are no different to other criminally violent men; stabbing, drug dealing and assault among them.
Great pain is taken to discuss how difficult it was for Aiden (Sarah) Riley to access a transfer to the female prison estate and how this contributed to his suicide, with little consideration of the fact he was given an OLR or “Order for Life” for his crime and if situated with women that this would have been horrifically traumatising to them, not to him.
These are not the sort of men whose life stories or deaths should be hosted in the window of a bookshop for children, specifically to elicit an emotional and sympathetic response. A series of reprehensible lies about some of the worst men in society, fed to children as examples of saintly figures murdered as a result of living in a “transphobic” society is a seriously unhinged act.
It should also be noted that many of the men on the list died a long time ago, Christine Chappel for example died in 2000. The list would have children believe that the murder of men who say they are women is a regular occurrence, when it is in fact thankfully very rare.
My partner and I visited the bookshop on Wednesday to ask why they were hosting such a list with such a terribly ill-informed list. They defended it vociferously as “aligning with our values”. I pointed out that the list was deceitful and asked that it be taken down. They refused.
If a tiny independent kid’s bookshop in a leafy middle-class suburb of Sheffield is willing to do this, then it is probably happening throughout the UK. As an act of child safeguarding, concerned adults should march into such shops and demand the owners take those lists down. If I am told about them, I will do so.
It is a villainous act to lie to children and portray villainous men as saints. Bookshops should aim to sell stories rather than lies.
Yesterday the list had been replaced with a note that read: “To all our trans family — you are not alone. You are loved. You are valid, and we will keep fighting for you.”
The sympathetic, but false, narrative of a vulnerable population of men under attack from vindictive women is more palatable to the young, ill-educated fools I encountered at the tills, than issuing an apology for lying about and supporting violent men.
It seems that women will have to endure being cast as the villains in our own story for quite some time yet. As we career from one win to the next, sticking our hard-earned rights back in our pockets, our faces will remain on the “WANTED” posters and the men destroying statues and punching us in the face will have pages written about their adorable violent crimes.
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
