Not Giving Up                                                                         

Advocating for children of transgender people can seem like a massive uphill battle. We are self-funding, grassroots, and the time we can spare is dependent on all our other obligations. The battle isn’t less daunting when you realise that coming down the hill at you are well-funded people who have decided that a lot of virtue can be signalled by making your life significantly more difficult. 

This is not normal. 

It was interesting reading journalist Nick Wallis this week talking about the puberty blockers trial challenge. Like a lot of people in family support groups, he’s echoing the incredulity we feel at this situation: “We …  are in a cultural minority. We are the people who believe the earth flies round the sun in a world where no one wants to look at the evidence that proves it does … Instead we have two sides, a toxic debate, a cultural paradigm of distress, affirmation, trans-ness which clearly exists and therefore cannot be denied.”

The state of this issue has become so unreal that I’m wondering if the theory that the Hadron Collider has propelled us into a parallel universe might have some truth to it.

For example, I grew up seeing Amnesty as an incredible organisation. Amnesty was a champion of free speech, supporting political prisoners across the world. So you can imagine my surprise when I glanced at my phone earlier this month only to find out that Amnesty had put Children of Transitioners in a report as ‘anti-rights’, and in a previous report as ‘anti-trans’.

Amnesty. 

There, among the dictators and military juntas and torturers Amnesty has named and shamed, is this little group advocating for children of transgender people. Not just us, of course: Trans Widows Voices and Genspect and the Bayswater Group, advocates for partners and parents and detransitioners too. 

And what rights, precisely, have we threatened? Children of Transitioners advocates for single sex spaces, fairness in courts, accurate paperwork for children, and for men to stop putting their nipples into babies’ mouths and ‘feeding’ them. This makes us somehow on a par with the Iranian government’s executioners.

We have written to Amnesty with Trans Widows Voices and had stock responses so far. It has removed the report from its website and sent us a weak apology (although some legal things will no doubt rumble on for a while), but the damage cannot be undone. It is forever online that we were named by Amnesty, making it easier for MPs, the NHS, the Police etc. to dismiss us as part of a ‘far right’ conspiracy. 

Chiara Capraro, Amnesty UK’s Gender Justice Programme Director, has appeared on podcasts talking about Amnesty’s opinions on the gender issue. She says Amnesty needs to be “leveraging bureaucracy,” “burying [groups like us] in paperwork and procedures” and “slowing down” how effective we can be.

That is precisely what has happened. Amnesty’s report generated abuse from activists and forced us all into an exhausting round of research, meetings, letters, complaints and legal consultation. Time that should have been spent supporting vulnerable people has instead been spent answering allegations for which Amnesty has supplied no evidence. Instead of engaging with us as victims and advocates, Amnesty placed us within a supposed “anti-rights” movement of 117 organisations, 37 of which it said had collectively spent more than £144 million between 2019 and 2024. Children of Transitioners are self-funding but the report’s presentation implied we have access to a well of money and international support.

Here are just a few examples of what the DARVO looks like when it relates to families, where the victims of abuse are turned into villains:

1. The Crown Prosecution Service has guidance on how trans and non-binary people may experience domestic abuse, but no corresponding section addressing women whose male partners transition, impose a new identity on the relationship, use shared money for transition, pressure family members to affirm them, threaten disclosure or make counter-allegations of transphobia. At one point, CPS guidance for prosecutors listed “withholding money for transitioning” and destroying clothes or medication as possible examples of domestic abuse—creating the impression that a spouse who declined to finance a partner’s transition could face criminal scrutiny.

• The government has published a draft Conversion Practices Bill, blatantly intended to deter families trying to find therapy for a trans relative. It has been threatened since 2018 and looks closer to going through than ever. – exploratory therapy or resistance to medicalisation is treated in the same light as kidnapping and beatings  The US, Canada and Australia have some form of ban either nationally or in certain states.

• When considering the ‘spousal veto’ in the Gender Recognition Act, politicians criticised spousal consent as ‘a horrible requirement’ and “[seeming] to border on the cruel.” This framing turns the trans widow into a  perpetrator.

• Amnesty’s report and the reaction. Transgenderreport.com commented: “J.K. Rowling and the “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs) are unsurprisingly uncomfortable with being grouped with fascists and religious extremist, even though they as far as trans people go share the same opinions and use the same talking points.“ It talks about us as ‘evil’ that needs to be fought, and adds “gender critical activism is part of a larger system of oppression, hate and persecution.”

I appreciate that some jobs are reliant for funding on a perception that they are necessary to fight a wrong. The creation of the ‘anti-rights’ network, however little it stands up to scrutiny, serves that function. As Jo Bartosch noted recently in UnHerd, “It is hard to persuade the reluctant masses that women can have penises, and so fear has become a substitute for reason.” But painting us as sinister, hateful, well-funded fascists obviously dehumanises us and makes it easier to justify violent responses. Take a look at the signs carried this year at Trans Pride or the material used by militant trans group Bash Back of examples of what people feel are justified responses to ‘TERFs’. 

If he feels free saying this in public, what do you think he says at home?

The Amnesty report was published on the day that UK politician Ann Widdecombe was murdered. Charlie Kirk’s killer is in pretrial right now and the prosecution is attempting to establish that the motivation was related to the issue of transgenderism. In 2023, a trans-identifying man with a history of violence threatened to rip out Helen Joyce’s eyes, cut off her hands and carve up her face. There are so many more cases like this. It is into this febrile atmosphere of political violence that we are dragged, with a big red TRANSPHOBIC target on our backs. I doubt anyone from Amnesty will have to walk past broken windows, with glass all over the ground, being verbally abused by trans activists, in order to speak at a film screening. This happened to me at FiLiA in October 2025 before a screening of Behind The Looking Glass. The previous night, Bash Back had smashed windows at the Brighton Centre. Now, bizarrely, Bash Back and Amnesty find themselves fighting the same corner.

Amnesty lent its signs to a previous protest at Filia. It intervened in opposition to women’s rights in the For Women Scotland appeal to the Supreme Court. Amnesty doesn’t seem to have made an isolated editorial mistake with this report, as it claims. As Josephine Bartosch argues in UnHerd, retracting the report while retaining the ideology behind it leaves Amnesty in an awkward position: a genuine apology would require the organisation to confront years of campaigning against sex-based rights.

We could really use an organisation the size of Amnesty right now to be looking at how transgenderism has become an excuse to abuse children. This isn’t just in the indoctrination and use of puberty blockers, but also the encouragement, tacit or otherwise, of adult males to ‘feed’ their babies from their chests.  LGBT Health and Wellbeing in Scotland runs ‘Queer Milk’ events, and there seems to be a welcome for men who want to ‘feed’ their babies. Just the concept of this is too far, normalising a form of child abuse which has spread through pornography. We need to be completely clear, so there is no doubt at all, that is it unacceptable for men to put their nipples into a baby’s mouth. There cannot be any obfuscation – this is child abuse. No public funding should be going to any group of this kind. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/breastfeeding-babies-trans-snp-7v59bfl2l?eafs_enabled=false. We have said for some time that it feels as if children of trans people aren’t getting the same safeguarding scrutiny as other children. Where are the orgs with Amnesty’s power challenging these practices? When did going after the victims of domestic abuse, rather than the perpetrators, become Amnesty’s remit?

In the meantime, we carry on. Families don’t have the option to drop trans as a no-longer-fashionable topic. We live this.

Terf bangs? Back in the day we called it the ‘Pageboy Cut’.

It’s me, hi. I’m the problem.

Me in my grandparents’ garden, not long before I went to live with my father and witnessed his transition. He was in the process of divorcing his second wife, whose comfort and sanity he’d completely destroyed. I’d really like to meet with the people behind the Amnesty report. I’d like to have them look me in the eyes and tell me how they think that girl evolved into… North Korea. How, in their imagination, I have become part of a network of hate organisations meeting in shady far-right spaces and sharing in millions in dodgy funding. Sure, it’s more interesting than the reality of a 55-year-old woman with childhood trauma, three cats and a veg garden plagued with bindweed. An ex-inner-city teacher who pays for the website and printing. But like many family members it’s my job to preserve the truth in the face of delusion. We are the holders of memories, of old names, of the facts of our lives. This picture was taken long before Donald Trump, the ‘transgender tipping point’, before it became a right/left issue. It was just families back then, just loss and isolation and devastation, and no way to find each other. 

There are more families now than I could ever have conceived of but the issues remain the same wherever we are on the political spectrum. Emotional Blackmail. Coercion. Abuse. Abandonment. Estrangement. Grief. We’ve seen it all and we are still here, still reaching out to others and saying, simply: you are not alone.

Transitioning is not a neutral act. People wouldn’t be threatening to cut us to pieces for talking about it if it was. I wouldn’t still be talking about it, decades after it began for me, if it was. We are human beings. We have real experiences we are sharing with others, to explain what it’s like and share with people who have been through the same. And if the people at Amnesty can’t listen to us, if we offend your sensibilities so much, could you at least please leave us alone?