How the trans cult weaponises suicide
Banning experimental puberty blockers will protect kids, not kill them.
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The UK’s new Labour government is already getting a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of the rainbow crusaders. The increasingly irrational trans lobby has launched a wholesale attack on the government after it confirmed a ban on puberty blockers earlier this month.
This furore had been building long before health secretary Wes Streeting announced the ban. Earlier this year, the previous Conservative government temporarily barred NHS England from prescribing puberty blockers outside of clinical trials (NHS Scotland shortly followed suit). This was a completely reasonable and necessary move following the publication of Dr Hilary Cass’s review into the NHS’s youth gender-identity services, in which she reached the conclusion that these drugs are potentially harmful.
The Cass Review was far too detailed and well-researched for it to be dismissed out of hand. Instead, the gender ideologues have resorted to emotional blackmail to try to have the ban overturned.
One of the loudest voices in this campaign has been Jolyon Maugham, the tax lawyer turned trans crusader at the head of the Good Law Project, which is currently attempting to take legal action against the puberty-blocker ban. Last month, Maugham made a series of breathtaking claims about an alleged surge in suicides among gender-confused children. He then doubled down on this last week, predicting that parents ‘will tip the ashes [of their transgender children] outside No 10 Downing Street’ in disgust at the government.
These alleged suicides, Maugham claims, were caused by restrictions on access to puberty blockers. These restrictions actually started after the December 2020 High Court ruling in the Bell vs Tavistock case, though this was later overturned until the full ban came into place in May 2024. According to Maugham, in the seven years up to December 2020, there had been only one suicide reported among trans-identifying children on the waiting lists for gender-identity clinics. In the three years after, he said, there had been 16. Even more remarkably, Maugham suggested there had been a nationwide cover-up at the highest levels of the NHS.
Instead of acknowledging how patently ridiculous these claims were, a swarm of activists trumpeted Maugham’s gothic tale. Nancy Kelley, ex-CEO of Stonewall, claimed, ‘I have no doubt [Maugham’s story] is a truthful one’. This is the same Nancy Kelley who is otherwise best known for claiming lesbians who refuse to date ‘women’ with penises are like anti-Semites and ‘sexual racists’.
Guardian columnist Owen Jones also endorsed this wild conspiracy theory earlier this month. He shared Maugham’s posts on X, bleating: ‘There is already evidence of a huge surge in the deaths of young trans people since their healthcare provision was trashed.’ Given that Jones is a notorious believer in ‘Queers for Palestine’, it’s fair to say he may not be the sharpest judge of reality.
All this was a transparent attempt to build pressure on Streeting to reverse the ban on puberty blockers. When he didn’t comply, the attacks only became more hysterical. Maugham claimed that the Labour Party would be haunted by an epidemic of suicides. Trans broadcaster India Willoughby predicted Streeting would be responsible for the deaths of ‘hundreds of young people’.
But would he? As claims ricocheted around social media, the NHS issued a statement that was a masterclass of rebuttal. Suicide expert Professor Louis Appleby examined Maugham’s assertions and concluded there is no evidence at all that restricting puberty blockers has led to a rise in suicides. Appleby also slated the claims about trans suicide as ‘insensitive, distressing and dangerous’.
You might think that after being so thoroughly called out by an expert, Maugham would desist. But no. Entirely unashamed, St Jolyon took to social media to claim that, whatever evidence Appleby had seen, it could not compare to his own conversations with worried parents – who he claimed were sleeping in their children’s bedrooms on suicide watch.
Maugham’s behaviour has been appalling, but it is nothing new for the trans movement. Unable to defend its position using evidence or argument, it seems to have entered a new and more pathological spiral in which it weaponises lurid claims about suicide in order to terrorise its own supporters and emotionally blackmail those in charge.
We cannot allow ourselves – or our politicians – to be manipulated by these zealots.
Malcolm Clark is a TV producer. Visit his substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.
Picture by: Getty.
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