Mick Hartley

An interview in the Telegraph with the redoubtable Baroness Emma Nicholson on her involvement in the trans debate:

“It first started when a couple of nurses came to see me and they said that they had been sacked from their jobs for refusing to agree to work in a way which was against their training,” the former MP recalls over a cup of tea. “They objected to saying that sex was assigned at birth and that objection got them the sack. I found it almost unbelievable.

“They were followed by two teachers who had refused to say that sex can be changed between man and woman, which had also got them the sack.

“They were all at the beginning of their careers, and they told me they were now unemployable in the NHS or schools. Four young women who were all intelligent, committed, and passionate about their work who were forbidden from working.”

The 81-year-old, seen as something of a trailblazer, has never shied away from a fight. Her opponents have included the Taliban, members of which she chided for their treatment of women when she became one of the first Western politicians to visit their refugee camps in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, and Saddam Hussein, who she challenged over the systematic persecution and extermination of the Marsh Arabs and launched a parliamentary campaign.

She has taken on child-trafficking gangs in Eastern Europe and even went up against the Iron Lady – her own boss – over the poll tax. But her latest fight, for the protection of sex-based rights and against the over-medicalisation of children, has somehow been different.

“I wrote letters to ministers and officials and I got ignored. Proper, House of Lords, well-constructed letters, and I got nothing. And I wondered what was going on,” she says….

She says that at the extreme end of trans activism “they are managing to persuade a lot of people to live their lives in a certain way but it is like one of those particularly terrible religious sects where they found their own belief system.

“They are the Pied Piper of Hamelin in a much nastier way, and what’s astonishing is how much of the world has picked it up.”

She has sympathy for people who have genuine gender dysphoria, having in the past helped to campaign for the rights of trans individuals, and believes that they too have been harmed by extremist activists.

“This movement isn’t actually for trans people, it is for liars who don’t need science and truth, who threaten children and young people with dire consequences if they don’t get themselves mutated.”