Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman, driven out of the Guardian and now writing in the Sunday Times, meets some of the women fighting for their daughters against the tide of trans ideology:

One recent evening I walked into a busy pub in central London, looking for a secret meeting. They spotted me first, and I was ushered to a table where no one could overhear us. There, groups of women were quietly talking among themselves. They all had one thing in common: they had a child — a daughter, almost invariably — who insisted that, despite being female, they were actually a boy. Their teachers and friends agreed with them — affirmed their gender identity, as the current lexicon has it. Their mothers disagreed, and because of this many of them had been reported by their child’s school to social services for infractions such as using female pronouns for their daughter.

This was a meeting for the Bayswater Support Group, a grassroots organisation for parents whose child wants to change gender.

Imagine someone reading this from ten, even five, years ago. What?? The damage that groups like Stonewall and Mermaids have done is incalculable. And hard to believe.

“We support our daughters, but there is a difference between support and enable. We can see that they’re struggling, and we’re trying to help them to love themselves, even if it makes everyone hate us,” said one mother.

The women talked to me about their daughters who had been bullied, or were gay, or anorexic, or on the autistic spectrum. In adolescence they had announced that they were a boy and threatened to commit suicide if their parents didn’t help them get sex change hormones and surgery. “It’s the same story over and over,” sighed one of the group’s organisers, whose daughter has since detransitioned and had a diagnosis of autism.

I’ve lost track of how many conversations I’ve had with friends about the disproportionate number of teenage girls suddenly insisting they’re boys. My friends always agree that it’s worrying, but worry that their kids will get cross with them for saying so. I can’t remember my parents ever not speaking an obvious truth because I might disapprove.

Yes, the problem's exacerbated by the need for so many modern parents to want to be friends with their kids and not just figures of authority. Old-fashioned parents didn't listen to their children and ignored their fads: modern parents think they know better, and indulge the little darlings. Somewhere there's a happy medium, but it's not easy – especially with the power of modern social media.

Bayswater was founded three years ago by three parents, and the group has grown, purely by word of mouth, from 60 members in the first year to over 500 now. They meet in secret, away from the disapproving eyes of those who insist that the idea a child can be in the wrong body is as unarguable as gravity. “Why aren’t teachers asking why our girls hate being girls? Instead they’re giving them rainbow flags and telling them they’re special,” one parent said. Bayswater parents think their child’s belief that they need to alter their body to be happy calls for something more than rainbows and affirmation. They think it requires parenting.

One Bayswater mother, “Emma”, told me that when she refused to buy her daughter a chest binder, her daughter sent her a link to a Stonewall study her school had given her, which claimed 48 per cent of transgender children attempt to kill themselves. “I thought that was an insanely dangerous thing to tell children,” Emma said.

Suicide is a subject I know more about than I’d like: in the summer my 21-year-old cousin killed himself, and I’ve lost three friends to suicide. None of them talked about suicide beforehand, ever. It was not a weapon they wielded to get their way. Suicide threats should always be taken seriously, but as a cry for help, not a demand for compliance.

No one ever confused parenting with a relaxing massage, and when you’re faced with a hysterical teenager, the path of least resistance can be extremely tempting. But, as one Bayswater mother said to me, “Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is say no and let them hate you.”