Dear [my MP],
I hope this letter finds you well, and I apologise in advance for its length: There is a lot to cover here, and I fear, even at this length, there are certain points I will not be able to explore fully.
Last year, before he became Prime Minister, Keir Starmer expressed an opinion that parents “have a right to know” if their child is expressing gender incongruity outside of the home. Trans people know intimately and immediately that outing a trans person without their consent is endangering them, and this position would be a clear-cut violation of the human right to privacy guaranteed both to trans people by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and to children by Article 16 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
But more practically, in terms of ‘safeguarding’ (a term that anti-trans activists love to throw around even as they dogmatically reject its most basic first principle), trans children are at higher risk of abuse. British children’s charities generally agree that this is so, though they cite low population numbers as a difficulty in obtaining statistically significant exact figures, but the American Academy of Pediatrics has found that trans children (in America, at least) are, compared to heterosexual cisgender children, 84% more likely to experience psychological abuse, 61% more likely to experience physical abuse, and more than twice as likely to experience sexual abuse. While these figures may not be exactly the same in the UK, it is, like I say, generally agreed among people whose job it is to know these things that the trend is the same. Meanwhile, back in the UK, an ONS report on child abuse from 2020 (which I believe is the most recent one) reveals that of all the cases of child abuse reported to the National Association for People Abused in Childhood helpline in the considered period, around 59% were perpetrated by either parents or step-parents, with an additional 15% being perpetrated by other family members.
Let us be clear, then, that in order to appeal to the anti-trans hate movement, the Prime Minister openly and unambiguously said that children at an elevated risk of abuse should be exposed to the exact people statistically most likely to be their abusers. This is a position that, truly, can only be sincerely held if child abuse is the desired and intended outcome, and therefore the Prime Minister has absolutely zero credibility when it comes to protecting children.
And so it is with things like the Online Safety Act. It is one thing to restrict children from accessing pornography, which is trumpeted as the big achievement. But on the ground we see that children are also being restricted from accessing information relating to things they might need to know for their own health and safety, such as LGBTQ+ issues, STIs, periods, eating disorders, to name but a few. And not only are they being restricted from access to information, they are, perhaps even more worryingly, also being restricted from access to peer support. I’m sure the standard response to this is that if kids have problems with any of these things they can just ask the people that we have already established to be statistically most likely to be their abusers.
Or they could ask their teachers. Unless it’s about a trans issue. And so we come to the recently published Guidance for Schools, which has been commonly referred to as a new Section 28. Section 28 was enacted the year after I started Primary School, and, in Scotland, repealed the year that I finished High School. Almost my entire pre-tertiary education occurred under its auspice. And what I noticed is that it didn’t keep me from knowing gay people existed: I knew that by at least age 9 if not before. All it served to do was to lower the quality of what I knew about gay people. Rather than useful information, my impression of gay people at the time was largely cobbled together from rumour, myth, assumption, stereotype, and prejudice.
If the first time was a failure, the second time feels deliberate. The Government knows that its most powerful weapons against trans people are, indeed, rumour, myth, assumption, stereotype, and prejudice. It knows, as young people’s LGBT+ charity Just Like Us found via survey, that people who know any trans people are twice as likely to support trans inclusion, and that 75% of people who oppose trans inclusion don’t know any trans people. It knows, in short, that the only way to fight us is with misinformation. And so it is, completely contrary to the entire purpose of schools, prohibiting schools from correcting misinformation. It is carving out a space in children’s lives where the lies and manipulation of transphobes are protected. And it is closing off avenues for trans kids to escape from abuse.
And we have to talk about proposals about limiting screen time. I understand the concerns about children being too attached to social media, but it cannot pass notice that this will disproportionately and disadvantageously impact children whose friends are miles away, children in communities whose populations are sparse and distributed, which is to say children both in minority communities and in rural communities. Those children, it seems, must be content to be isolated.
Outside of the Government, transphobes tell the same story. JK Rowling, despite her frequent claims that “trans ideology” is ‘totalitarian,’ has outright demanded that anyone who supports trans children should be imprisoned. For Women Scotland, famously at the centre of that notorious anti-trans Supreme Court decision, have recently attacked The Equality Network for supporting and campaigning for the safety of queer children, which they grossly mischaracterise as ‘grooming.’ Transphobes in general have used the term “social contagion” to describe trans boys being overrepresented in youth gender clinics, though in fact recent data has shown that the reason trans boys are overrepresented is that trans girls are less likely to transition early enough to be represented in the youth intake, possibly due to social pressure.
There is a concerted effort between the Government and transphobic hate groups to keep children (a) unsupported, (b) uninformed, and (c) isolated. Despite the Prime Minister’s insistence that this is all about “protecting children,” and despite the anti-trans activists’ eager use of the word ‘groomer’ to smear the targets of their hate and insinuate that there is something suspicious about us protecting those most vulnerable of our own people, this is a cocktail for manufacturing vulnerability to abuse, particularly among those children already marginalised.
There are two statements people with abusive personalities use to try to excuse their behaviour that are so common as to have become clichés: “I’m the real victim here,” and, “It’s for your own good.” The former of these is not necessarily relevant to the topic of this letter, but I include it because between the both of them they also, not coincidentally, characterise the vast majority of transphobic rhetoric in the past decade.
In the latter case, an abuser identifies the support network their target has, and makes up stories about the target being confused and manipulated by their supporters in order to isolate them. The abuser then declares that, because of that confusion, the target’s own agency cannot be trusted, and so “for their own good” the abuser must intervene, trying to get the target to depend on them for ‘safety,’ inserting themselves in a position to build up their control and authority over another person. That is grooming, and that is precisely how these anti-trans hate groups operate.
I well understand why transphobes leap to the ‘groomer’ accusation. It is not just because every accusation is a confession. It is because the suggestion of harm to children inspires anger, to the point of even violent impulses. It is not out of any genuine concern for children, but in the hopes of weaponising that violent anger against marginalised people. The proper term for this, as I’m sure you know, is “stochastic terrorism”: stopping short of directly inciting violence, but spreading propaganda that makes violence a more likely outcome.
Of course, I wouldn’t like to promote violence myself, but these people are harming and endangering children, and I am not immune to the common and reasonable response of that making me extremely angry. But according to the press and now the Government, it is not ‘reasonable’ when I have that response after careful examination of the relevant facts: That privilege is reserved for transphobes and their bigoted assumptions. In particular, we have the Technology Secretary’s insulting, dangerous, and, frankly, ludicrous assertion that being concerned about children’s safety, welfare, and above all protection from abuse puts us “on the side of the predators.”
Yours Sincerely,
Catriona Faolain
[Address redacted]