Billie Jean Sweeney

‘Rising anti-trans hatred’ in the UK creating ‘hostile environment’, report suggests 99 per cent of trans people say media coverage of issue has harmed their mental health

The story has been picked up by mainstream press.

Great work by @transactualuk.bsky.social

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Conventional wisdom is a really fascinating phenomenon. We're at the point where "everyone knows" kids were being rushed into inappropriate gender transition.

There are between zero and 10 recorded cases of this happening (depending on your definition of rushed).

And the Atlantic author backs his broad assertions up with …. nothing.

It’s become doctrine in the anti-trans crowd. They’ve become so inured to their activist dogma they don’t even try to be journalists

And the Atlantic author backs his broad assertions up with …. nothing.

It’s become doctrine in the anti-trans crowd. They’ve become so inured to their activist dogma they don’t even try to be journalists

These steps toward caution are wise, but an underlying problem remains: Society still has an irrational fear of effeminate boys, who should be free to live their life without altering anything about themselves. Gender-nonconforming children continue to get the strong impression from censorious peers and well-meaning adults alike that they’d be better off if they became something other than what they are.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Where? How? These people have been pooping this stupid myth back and forth for so long that they don't even bother to provide basic evidence anymore.

It's the *premise* of the article, how did an editor not ask for specific numbers and peer-reviewed studies on this alleged phenomenon?

I feel like there’s a parallel to the gay panics of the 80s and 90s, where they were (many still are) eaten up by fear that the sales pitch for gay is just SO STRONG that if allowed to flourish, all people will choose gay. And they took rising numbers of gay self-ID as proof of their theory (1)

When it was obv never that everyone would be gay, but in a world full of acceptance there’d be a lot more of us!

Same with trans folks, I reckon!

But they’re out here assuming kids are getting irresistible transgender timeshare presentations from their doctors.

Before long they’ll all sign up!

Anti-trans disinformation is a profitable genre

“Every trans person is activist”

In Defense of Effeminate Boys If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded. By Ben Appel

If medical authorities have a rigorous way of distinguishing effeminate boys from transgender kids—or of distinguishing transgender kids from proto-gay kids—they aren’t saying. I have met a number of detransitioned gay men who tried to live as women for a time because they and their families were so averse to homosexuality. According to a 2019 report in The Times of London, staffers at Britain’s foremost gender-identity clinic joked darkly that, as a result of the facility’s work, “there would be no gay people left.” A statement last month by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons noted that there is no validated way to assess whether a child’s gender distress will persist over time or disappear without medical intervention. A lack of good research and recordkeeping means that we may never know how many patients who would have been considered effeminate gay boys not so long ago have undergone medical treatments for gender dysphoria.

Absolute trash. The author did not speak to a single medical professional and the article does not contain a shred of evidence that effeminate gay boys are being bamboozled into thinking they're trans.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Right. The premise is biased and lacks intellectual rigour. The Atlantic and the nyt share a predilection for these biased premises.

That’s how the nyt wound up doing a fawning profile recently on the unprincipled race provocateur Nick Shirley even as they routinely treat trans ppl, as an entire class, w contempt.

It’s not that the nyt profile of Shirley didn’t include criticism of him or reflect some reporting.

It was the story’s flawed celebratory angle, which portrayed Shirley in the most generous of lights

But Shirley had a record of racism and the use of unprincipled tactics. Wasn’t that the story?

Anti-vaxxers are bad parents. Not vaccinating your child is abuse.

We should eliminate all non-medical exemptions for vaccines.

Sorry, not sorry.

It’s not that the nyt profile of Shirley didn’t include criticism of him or reflect some reporting.

It was the story’s flawed celebratory angle, which portrayed Shirley in the most generous of lights

But Shirley had a record of racism and the use of unprincipled tactics. Wasn’t that the story?

That’s how the nyt wound up doing a fawning profile recently on the unprincipled race provocateur Nick Shirley even as they routinely treat trans ppl, as an entire class, w contempt.

Right. The premise is biased and lacks intellectual rigour. The Atlantic and the nyt share a predilection for these biased premises.

It's so fucking insulting how these people don't bother to achieve the most basic understanding of the issue they've dedicated their careers to.

As an effeminate gay boy I never experienced gender dysphoria! These are easily distinguishable concepts for anyone who actually listens to the child.

It was in those spaces, in the late 2010s, that I realized that the fundamentalist Christians I’d grown up with weren’t the only people enforcing rigid ideas about how others should think. After arriving in New York with mainstream Democratic views, I took classes heavy on critical theories that fixated on identity categories and reflexively decried capitalism and the West. Within influential LGBTQ organizations, gay rights had given way to radical queer politics, and academic theories about sex and gender had hardened into doctrine. Widespread revulsion toward Donald Trump had narrowed the boundaries of permissible discussion on the left. The more Trump and his followers opposed something, the more we were supposed to support it. The prevailing view was that any debate within our side would become ammunition for the right.

For a long time, I feared that if I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself, I would lose the only community I’d ever really belonged in. As controversy flared up nationally about pediatric gender medicine, though, I started voicing concerns, rooted in my own experiences, over what looked to me like a rush to medical treatment. For all the sloganeering about protecting trans kids, I heard no discussion about protecting effeminate gay boys from unnecessary medicalization. When I and others asked whether progressive norms might be nudging effeminate gay boys to think of themselves as girls, no one wanted to hear it. Instead of answers, we were given the LGBTQ community’s official line. “Gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things,” the Human Rights Campaign asserts. But the confidence with which people claim that the two have nothing to do with each other is hard to square with research findings: According to data collected mostly before the recent surge in pediatric-dysphoria diagnoses, most prepubescent children who experienced gender distress went on to experience same-sex attraction and ultimately did not pursue a gender transition. Of 70 adolescents whom Dutch clinicians subjected to puberty suppression from 2000 to 2008, the overwhelming majority were attracted exclusively to people of their biological sex.

Straightforward right-wing agitprop. The idea that thousands of kids were pushed into gender-affirming surgeries because the left shuts down debate is a laughable conspiracy theory. The overwhelming social pressure is to be cis, not trans!

So, Michael Foran doesn't really find in current law what he's looking for. He's hard at work scrounging around, but it's really slim pickings. One aim is to resurrect past ideas about cis women as less capable, vulnerable creatures for whom there are separate legal provisions. 6/

Similarly: Cis people do not give half a shit about women's sports until trans people get involved, then suddenly they transform into God's Greatest Advocate for Womens' Concerns... for this one specific issue, regardless of what the actual women involved feel.

Every trans woman I know has had "why not be an effeminate man?" shoved in our faces for ages and yet thus piece suggests that even once suggesting an effeminate boy might be trans is some sort of crime against humanity.

This is transphobia.

N.Y. Attorney General Warns Hospitals Against Canceling Transgender Care A White House executive order threatened to pull federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for trans youth. But not providing the care could violate state law, Letitia James sa...

New York Attorney General Letitia James has warned New York hospitals that complying with Trump's executive order that seeks to end gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth could violate state law. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/n...

AG Letitia James Just Stood Up For Trans Youth In New York. Now, Will Mayor Mamdani Act? Attorney General Letitia James has demanded NYU Langone restart care for transgender youth. Will NYC Mayor Mamdani act as well?

AG Letitia James Just Stood Up For Trans Youth In New York. Now, Will Mayor Mamdani Act? • Attorney General Letitia James has demanded NYU Langone restart care for transgender youth. Will NYC Mayor Mamdani act as well?

Nazi Klan policies pair up with Kafkaesque bureaucratic incompetence to terrorize and waste the time of someone who was actually never even violating this viciously monstrous law.

people have been lied to about this. the GOP, the NYT, and sundry centrists have spread this bullshit story where kids are being bum rushed into surgery by a shadowy conspiracy of endocrinologists and gender ideologues

The Trump Administration is Testing Conversion Therapy By Medically Experimenting on Trans People in Prisons The Bureau of Prisons is subjecting trans people to conversion therapy and denying them care with the goal of helping them "recover." It's trying to prove dangerous conversion practices can work.

Recently became aware of the work @transitics.substack.com is doing. Impressive stuff here on Trump's prison policy.

transitics.substack.com/p/the-trump-...

What we are seeing is a deliberate, well-funded campaign to make transgender Americans second-class citizens—without legal protections and vulnerable to state violence.

There's been a lot of debate within the Democratic establishment about what rhetoric to use via ICE.

Well, an incumbent doesn't lose by 48 percentage points very often—and her vote on collaborating with ICE was the defining issue here.

Meanwhile, the Dutch sent a plane to repatriate folks stranded.