thank you to Sharon for brining to my attention that since at least 2012, Marco Rubio has confused Chiang Kai-shek for something he imagined:
www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/m...
The classic 'if you go to university or support immigrants and queers you are no longer working class, regardless of your actual material class position, because class positions are vibes and the working class can never be "progressive" or educated'
'We think' doing a lot of work here. There's a version of the Christian platonism vs Gnosticism argument in the background here, where Cass et al see themselves as understanding the proper ends of bodies as opposed to the distorted, heretical view they attribute to 'trans activists'
(young people, obvs.)
Sounds about right...
Bleak week for news again, eh?
This is the assumption behind conversion therapy, that people can and should hide and suppress the their foundational ways of experiencing the world so they can be made to be 'normal' instead.
Oh, wait, this is the dynamic. Cass et. al. think that 'gender questioning' young people can be made 'trans' by coddling them, just as conservative Christians think 'young people with same sex attraction' can be made 'gay'.
'if you have same sex attraction that means you're trans' said noone ever. 'It's ok to struggle with same sex attraction, that's just a cross you have to bear and a calling to celibacy - you don't have to be gay' is something many you people will have heard in churches this morning.
Again reminding people that until very recently 'same sex attraction' was a term you only really found in conservative Christian circles as a way to mark people 'struggling with same sex attraction' as something different and better than 'gay people'
Oh, look where the 'biological womanhood' framing is cropping up now...
What's being proposed is horrific, demeaning, and ostracising for trans kids, and it's still not enough for these people becuase it allows a sliver of possibility for existing as a trans child. They wouldn't even be satisfied with a full ban because the concept of transness would still exist.
pure elite capture - the uk just folded to a hardline anti-trans campaign pushed by a tiny number of people
www.thepinknews.com/2026/02/11/n...
Not to mention that this clinical support simply doesn't exist...
Just imagine, today, if children got referred to "clinical support" if they expressed any interest in "gay feelings" with the Government saying that approval for them to be allowed to express being homosexual at school would only be likely in very limited circumstances.
That's what this guidance is
Like, the implicit social punishment and self policing was bad enough! This actually seems worse!
Just feeling all kinds of ways about younger me and how much I wish I'd had language for what I was feeling and how awful it must be to have that language and reach out to an adult and then be told explicitly 'actually, no, we know better and are going to do deliberate social punishment'
So it took me until I was in my 30s to realise that the chronic depression and dissociation was gender dysphoria because of how effectively schools in the 90s and 00s seeded cisness as destiny. Guess that's better than allowing kids to be who they are.
We (trans safety network) met with Cass during her research on the Cass review and explained how clearly ridiculous it would be to try and bring haircuts and self expression under the authority of being a "medical intervention".
She went away from that meeting and produced this crap anyway.
This is clear because there is no equivalent conscience clause for staff or students who feel that participating in the systematic refusal of a trans kid's identity would violate /their/ right to believe that trans kids are trans.
So any harm caused to trans children by the guidence is always an inevitably less severe than the potential harm of a cis kid thinking they're trans for a bit, or a bigoted teacher having to violate their conscience. >
It's not just 'oh, the schools guidence discourages social transition' it's that the entire logic underpinning the thing is that it's somewhere between bad and impossible for a child to be trans, >
270. The school or college should also make sure that children and their families are aware that while the school or college will appropriately sanction any cases of bullying or harassment, and take a strong stand against bullying, the school or college must also be conscious of the rights of pupils and staff in relation to their religion or belief. However, schools and colleges supporting social transition might consider discussing options with pupils and staff such as using names instead of pronouns.
Literally saying that being gender critical overrides protections against harassment.
Oh ffs
It's worth noting that this was also a pretext to open up new services designed and run by people who push an unproven pseudoscientific "Gender Exploratory Therapy" model that has been likened to conversion therapy by international experts.
Transphobia is misogyny is transphobia is misogyny is transphobia is misogyny...
One aspect of FWS that has not been widely remarked on is the bald assertion by UKSC (para 178) that trans women can’t breastfeed. This is, of course, false. But this falsehood was part of the reasoning behind the claim that the Equality Act obviously has a trans-exclusionary understanding of sex.
It's just the fact that kids learn about how articles show bias in GCSE English, and yet you know they'll point to 'well we covered different points of view' to ignore how clearly it privileges one perspective in its framing
Oh, wait, is this a 'people keep complaining that we're using the biological x who identifies as y slur, so instead we've written this nonsense we can link to every time we say "trans"` thing?
It says it's an update of an article first published in 2020, but I've not been able to easily find the original (just plugging the url into the wayback machine didn't help)
