Mick Hartley

Julie Bindel at UnHerd:

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national average of children in care in Blackpool.

The sex trade – both legal and illegal – is rife. The proliferation of lap dance clubs and bars catering to groups of men on stag weekends has given the town a reputation as a haven for sex tourists. Queen Street, which is a focus for Blackpool’s night life, has also seen an increase in underage prostitution. Last year there were 87 visits by police and local authority inspectors to premises where children were believed to be sexually exploited.

The town, unsurprisingly, is a magnet for predatory paedophiles.

But there is one thing I didn’t know about Blackpool, which I learned from listening to Inside the Gender Clinic, a podcast about the much maligned Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. The majority of referrals to the clinic are not, as one might assume, from the South, or from Brighton, but from Blackpool. This is surely the last place you’d expect to see so many trans-identified children. After all, the voices we so often hear on this issue in the media tend to belong to upper middle-class kids raised in liberal families.

So why might this be so?

Claire*, who grew up in Blackpool, is working for a charity that supports female victims of male violence. She tells me that the links between the rise in young females being referred to gender identity clinics and the realities of growing up in places like Blackpool are obvious. She cites high levels of poverty and the normalisation of the exploitation of women and girls in the sex trade.

As a child, Claire, who was raised in Blackpool, was subject to men’s violence and consequently wanted to “opt out of girlhood”. She says: “The option to be removed from the harms of men would be appealing to most survivors. I am furious that we are allowing girls who need care and support to go down irreversible paths.”

I have long argued that the majority of girls presenting as gender dysphoric have experienced childhood trauma. What if the availability of breast binders, puberty blockers and instant affirmation as trans is a handy way for traumatised sexual abuse victims to dissociate from the abused body?

Abused young girls seize on what seems to be the only way out that's offered to them: ditch the horrible girl bodies that've caused them so much pain, and embrace gender dysphoria. Of course it's not the answer – but it's the only answer they're being offered.

Until recently, Norma* was a secondary school teacher in Blackpool. She tells me she saw transgender ideology creeping in among young girls: “I tried to raise the alarm of the potential harms surrounding gender non-conforming young women and girls to safeguarding leads. This was met with naivety of the realities of the situation and their insistence on using ‘he/him’ pronouns with no scrutiny as to any other issues.” …

Abused, damaged and traumatised girls have long self-harmed by cutting or starving themselves in an attempt to escape their bodies… So why are these agencies and charities so ready to suggest puberty blockers rather than properly scrutinising what makes a teenager believe she’s a boy?

Blackpool seems to offer a clear example of how vulnerable, damaged children are being drawn to gender ideology because it offers a “one stop shop” solution to the pain of living as a female in a hellish world of abuse. “These girls have been horrifically betrayed,” says Norma. “Why are we sending them for irreversible, damaging treatment, when what they need is protection from sexual violation and abuse?”