(LifeSiteNews) — For a decade, the transgender movement has been telling our culture a story: the story of boys and girls trapped in the wrong bodies and feeling suicidal as a result. The only answer to this, this movement has told us, is to free these trapped, invisible boys and girls with drugs, hormones, and surgical tools. Young people must go under the knife to become their true selves, and those who oppose this are pushing kids to kill themselves. It is a potent narrative.
Now, the de-transitioners are coming forward with a different story. Their story is one of adolescent confusion hastily diagnosed by medical ideologues as “gender dysphoria,” and suffering often irreversible physical, mental, and sexual damage as a result. Their testimonies of scarred chests and shattered lives are heartbreaking to hear — but despite attempts by the LGBT movement and their press propaganda arm to ignore or discredit them, their voices are getting louder. They are changing minds.
The latest to respond to these stories is famed Scottish journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil, chairman of The Spectator and host of Channel 4’s Andrew Neil Show. On July 28, he posted a video of de-transitioner Chloe Cole testifying about her experience to lawmakers:
This is heartbreaking. It is barbaric. What have we become? https://t.co/NGsfdvVdZf
— Andrew Neil (@afneil) July 28, 2023
Heartbreaking. Barbaric. Accurate words, but powerful coming from one of the U.K.’s most respected journalists. On August 1, Neil followed up with a column in the Daily Mail titled “Why I’m proud to be a ‘TERF’ and join JK Rowling on the front line in the gender wars,” in which he detailed his change of mind on the subject:
It all started innocently enough. I watched the testimony of a 19-year-old Californian, Chloe Cole, before a committee of the U.S. Congress last Thursday.
She was giving evidence about the experience she underwent in her transition to becoming a boy and it was pretty harrowing stuff.
Chloe revealed she had been given puberty blockers aged 13 and underwent a double mastectomy aged 15. Now de-transitioning, she fought back the tears as she revealed to the politicians before her that she had scars on her breast, her nipples weeped fluids, she would never be able to breastfeed, she struggled to look at herself in the mirror and when she did she saw a ‘monster’.
I fought to hold back my own tears.
Why had her parents gone along with all this? The doctors prescribing the drugs and proposing the mutilation, she explained, had asked them if they wanted a ‘dead daughter’ or a ‘live trans son’.
His tweet, Neil wrote, triggered a “baptism of fire” into the transgender debate, which he’d never commented on before publicly. The smears came in. A Tory cabinet minister texted him: “Welcome to the dark side.” (Which is to say, the light side — or at least the right side.) Neil then experienced firsthand the torrent of abuse any public figure receives for bucking transgender orthodoxy — abuse that other “TERFs” — Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” — have been getting in spades for years. Women began sharing their own experiences being targeted by trans activists with him: “One woman showed me evidence of threats to ‘come to your house’ and ‘rip the nipples off your bare chest’. Another was promised a ‘night of the long knives’. And there’s much worse than this. It’s simply unrepeatable in a newspaper.”
Neil began digging into the issue further, noting that critics of the transgender movement have often paid dearly and professionally for speaking out. “These injustices happened under my nose. Either I took no notice, or didn’t think it was my fight — when it should be everybody’s fight,” he wrote. “Of course, journalists like me were not entirely unaware of transgender controversies. We watched, shaking our heads, as men who had transitioned to women started winning events in women’s sports.” But Neil, like most others, ignored the issue. Now, he noted, he has begun his research and is joining the fray.
“If this analysis proves broadly right, we’re living through a medical and societal scandal of massive proportions,” he observed. “I’m ready for the further abuse that awaits me for siding with such company. Frankly, it’s water off a duck’s back. And it’s never as brutal against men as it is women, which speaks volumes for those dishing out the abuse.”
Neil is a formidable journalist and debater, and I look forward to seeing him array his fierce talents in this fight. Once again, Chloe Cole’s story has made a difference.
