Time to Stop

A call out to everyone in children's publishing

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

Are you awake now publishers? Yes, I’m pointing the finger at you Scholastic and Hachett Children’s Group and Orion Children’s Books and Andersen Press, and all the others who blithely – indeed, wilfully – commissioned books celebrating the joy of ‘transitioning’ and being anything other than our own sexed bodies. To children.

Are you awake now, all the booksellers who’ve shoved these books front and centre? Yes, Waterstones, I’m looking at you and your enthusiasm for promoting Lewis Hancox’s hellish Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure and L.D. Lapinski’s Jamie, two books celebrating the use of puberty blockers without once mentioning that there is zero evidence they are either safe or effective. St. Hell’s also showed its protagonist injecting herself with testosterone *.

Are you awake now too, the School Library Association and all the libraries around the country who’ve shoved these books and others like them front and centre? And yes, in this instance my finger is pointing directly at Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library and its heinous ‘Trans Joy’ display, programmed to coincide with the Easter school holidays and situated next to the children’s book section. To reach their dedicated section of the library, children were confronted with such delights as a model of a frankenpenis grafted onto a mutilated labia. I’m not going to share the images here, but follow this link to a thread by Norwich Women’s Rights Group and you can see them for yourself. Warning though – you will need a strong stomach. In the interest of fairness, the Leader of Norfolk County Council had this display taken down as soon as the complaints started rolling in.

Only a month ago, in the wake of NHS England’s ban on gender distressed children being prescribed puberty blockers outside of clinical research, I wrote that everyone in children’s publishing needed to come together in a show of strength to end the publishing and promotion of books encouraging the idea that changing sex is possible, desirable and necessary. It’s a need that’s only grown in its urgency. We now know, unequivocally, that by continuing to publish these books, you are actively causing harm. The final report of the Cass Review, published on the 10^th April, makes this abundantly clear – Dr Cass identified social transitioning as an ‘active intervention.’ By publishing books that let children believe social transitioning (along with the puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones already mentioned) is no big deal, you are playing your part in this active intervention. You are normalising it. You are normalising a pathway that leads to sterility, loss of sexual function, loss of bone density, the likely screw up of brain development, and god knows what else that will come out when the adult gender identity services finally share the data on the 9,000 patients who have passed through their doors. Data they are being forced to share.

An extremely high proportion of the children and adolescents who take the aforementioned pathway are autistic and/or have mental health problems and/or have a history of sexual abuse. These children needed and deserved full holistic care. Instead, they were shunted onto an unstoppable medical train that you helped promote and normalise. The vast majority of these children and adolescents are also gay.

You have been swayed by the bullies in children’s publishing to drown out the voices of reason pleading for sanity and evidence of safety. We have the evidence now. It doesn’t exist. The little evidence that could be scraped together only adds to the growing horror that great harm has been done to children. This evidence is growing by the day.

The voices that were either pushed out of publishing or cowered into silence need to be drawn back out and heard and, in cases such as Rachel Rooney, Onjali Rauf and Gillian Philip, profusely and publicly apologised to. But make no mistake – the bullies are not going anywhere. As I’ve written before, they are far too entrenched in the ideology and have far too much to lose to ever admit they are wrong. They cannot allow themselves to comprehend that they have been actively harming the children they passionately believe themselves to have been helping. We know now, unequivocally, that the very last thing they have been doing is helping and now you must be unequivocal in your refusal to listen to them any more.

If none of this convinces those of you in publishing who write, edit, publish, promote, sell and lend these books to put a stop to it, then I ask you this: Would you actively write/publish/promote a book that normalises and glamourises cigarettes and alcohol to children? If not, then why on earth would you continue writing and publishing books that normalise and glamourise a life of sterility, mutilation, vaginal and testicle atrophy, osteoporosis and all the rest of it to vulnerable and impressionable children?

As Graham Linehan, the great comedy writer vilified for calling out the dangers of this ideology to children said, ‘You don’t tell children that they’re born in the wrong body… Because they will believe you.’ And he’s right. You know he’s right. After all, children believe us when we tell them Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy exist.    

*The Cass report made the case that cross sex hormones should only be prescribed to under 18s in exceptional cases.