The trans ‘Safe With Me’ campaign is a safeguarding nightmare

If there’s one thing predators are good at, it’s spotting soft targets. Thanks to Dr Ronx Ikharia, this could soon be easier than ever. Ikharia – a BBC children’s presenter and NHS emergency medic who identifies as ‘trans nonbinary’ – has launched a new scheme called ‘Safe With Me’. It involves distributing large yellow badges, which signal that the wearer is available to escort ‘trans+ people’ to ‘their preferred facilities’. In other words, it is to help men in frocks breach the law on single-sex spaces.

More than £10,000 has already been raised to flood institutions, offices and events with these free badges. Most alarming is the potential involvement of schools. Ikharia now denies claims that the badges will be sent to schools, even though ‘schools’ are still, at the time of writing, explicitly listed on the Safe With Me GoFundMe page as places where the yellow badges will be distributed. Several outlets, including a pro-trans blog, have quoted her as saying she wants them to be ‘everywhere. At schools, in NHS settings, at festivals, in shops.’ Badge-wearers – potentially including children – are asked to pledge their loyalty to ‘trans+ safety, dignity and joy’, and to act as chaperones to shield deluded law-breakers from reality.

Those most likely to don the badge will be the young, the idealistic and the terminally naïve. Given that around 70 per cent of men identifying as trans in UK prisons have convictions for sexual offences and violent crimes, this scheme isn’t a harmless gesture. It is a set of grisly headlines and court appearances waiting to happen.

It’s no surprise Ikharia seems to have overlooked the risks here. She has the monomaniacal focus of a true believer. Not only did she have her own breasts amputated to align with her ‘trans nonbinary’ identity – she has also used her position as a children’s TV presenter to promote harmful interventions to confused young people. In one BBC Three clip, she hands out a new breast binder to a girl whose previous use of one had displaced her ribs. Last year, Ikharia led a protest outside a conference at the Royal College of General Practitioners, where experts gathered to discuss evidence-based care for children who believe they are trans. After bellowing through a megaphone to disrupt the meeting, she declared on Instagram that opposing ‘access to gender affirmation’, including puberty blockers, is ‘dehumanising’. The Cass Review, published last year, has since exposed this view as pseudoscience.

Ikharia’s badges are a petulant response to the recent UK Supreme Court ruling that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological reality, not identity. This legal clarity has caused a moral panic among activists. As Ikharia told the local press: ‘The ruling means trans+ people may be forced into spaces where they don’t feel safe… Toilets are one of the most dangerous of these spaces.’

On that final point, she’s right. Public toilets can be dangerous places. Undoubtedly, ‘trans + people’ like Katie Dolatowski, a 6’5” male sex offender who preyed on a 10-year-old girl in a supermarket toilet, would have sought out a schoolchild wearing a badge offering assistance. Dolatowski went on to be housed in a women’s prison and later, horrifyingly, in a domestic-violence refuge in Leeds – alongside mothers fleeing male violence. The Supreme Court ruling ought to ensure such horrors cannot be repeated.

Ikharia is, of course, free to believe she’s ‘transmasculine’ or ‘nonbinary’ or whatever the label du jour may be. But when those beliefs bleed into public-health messaging and children’s broadcasting, they stop being personal – they become political and dangerous. With her BBC platform and medical title, Ikharia has abused public trust to push a campaign that actively undermines child safeguarding, medical ethics and the law.

Ikharia’s selfish and ill-conceived campaign is not a gesture of kindness. It is an invitation to harm.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here.