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This post is about our correspondence with IICSA, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. When we initially contacted them in 2019 our rationale was that if the government was too scared to challenge the trans lobby, maybe the inquiry wouldn’t be. Now is a timely opportunity to publish and reflect on our correspondence with IICSA, given the current wide public discussion and prominence in the media of how a child safeguarding scandal has been allowed to continue for so long.

We do not have a good child safeguarding record in this country. In the current re-focus by the media on the scandal of the so-called ‘grooming gangs’ we have been struck by the parallels with the response to the harms of the trans movement.

Whistleblowers have been punished, and fear of accusations of ‘racism’ in the former case and ‘transphobia’ in the latter have silenced others who should speak out, resulting in a scandalous dereliction of society’s duty to safeguard children. Abuse and negligence have been allowed under the guise of respecting children’s ‘autonomy’ or ‘agency,’ or children’s ‘rights.’

Professor Alexis Jay, who led IICSA, recently highlighted similar issues of toxic debate and fear of professionals to speak up that let children down in towns like Rotherham, with the findings in the Cass Review.

Professor Jay said:

“None of this is helpful to children at the centre of this febrile debate around sex and gender, and may serve to confuse the issues even further. All organisations, public institutions and politicians need to be clear in their approach to these difficult decisions that the ‘paramountcy’ principle prevails in law, policy and practice across health, justice and children’s services, amongst others.” 

The paramountcy principle means that the welfare of the child must come before, and take priority over, any other factors.

In April 2019 we wrote to IICSA, by email and post, enclosing a 12 page report on the safeguarding concerns we had identified in schools resources written by trans and LGBT organisations. Our report can be read here. We highlighted the advice of Stonewall and Intercom Trust as two organisations promoted in Dept for Education guidance, specifically in regard to:

• Promising confidentiality to a child

• Parental Alienation

• Promoting use of off label drugs and minimising harms

• Erosion of sexual boundaries

In our letter we wrote:

I am the founder of the organisation Transgender Trend, a group of parents who are concerned about the medical ‘transition’ of minors, ‘gender identity’ teaching in schools and the erosion of girls’ rights and protections as a sex. We are non-religious, apolitical and we support transgender people’s rights.

I represent both parents and professionals from all walks of life who have contacted me with concerns about transgender guidance and training in schools where they work or which their children attend.

I would be grateful if you would take the time to read the enclosed document regarding transgender guidance which is clearly in breach of government safeguarding policy in schools. The advice currently disseminated by these political lobby groups I believe puts a vulnerable group of children at great risk of harm by leaving them alienated from their families and outside the safeguarding of their schools. The guidance also fundamentally fails to safeguard girls.

I have drawn up the enclosed document to highlight the advice of only those organisations which are endorsed by the Department for Education and I ask several questions which I think are in need of urgent consideration.

I would be very happy to meet with you to explain further my concerns in this area and I look forward to your response.

IICSA did not take up our request to meet but we hoped they had found our report helpful and had taken our points on board.

Then in May 2022 IICSA produced an engagement report titled Engagement with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning + victims and survivors.

For this report they had also engaged with ‘LGBTQ+ support services’ – including Stonewall and Intercom Trust – and seem to have taken everything they say at face value. The concerns we had raised about these organisations seem to have been ignored.

In July 2022 we wrote to them again to outline our concerns with the engagement report, including some of the language used (including ‘LGBTQ+ children’) the conflation of LGB with TQ+, the wide meaning of Q+ including fetish and kink, specific vulnerabilities and safeguarding issues for children who claim to be ‘trans’, use of Stonewall suicide ideation data, and their glossary of activist concepts and language. We included passages from the recently published Cass Interim Report. Our full letter can be read here.

This time we received a reply which we reproduce in full here:

Thank you for your correspondence dated 6 July 2022. We appreciate the time you’ve taken and the detail you’ve provided us with in your email.

The aim of this engagement activity was two fold:

1) to provide LGBTQ+ identifying (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender and queer/questioning) members of the Inquiry’s Victims and Survivors Forum an opportunity to be listened to, believed and taken seriously.

2) To corroborate this testimony with what we heard from professionals and provide an undiluted review of what we heard to the Chair and Panel in order to provide additional information for their consideration.

Engagement activities are not formal evidence-gathering sessions or research, and this publication was not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of all the views we heard, nor does it make general conclusions about children who are victims of child sexual abuse in the wider population. We understand the limitations of any engagement activity looking into such broad and complex issues of gender, sexuality and identity. However, we were committed to providing greater depth and insight to some of the issues raised to us by victims and survivors of the Inquiry’s Forum and professional stakeholders across England and Wales. This report reflects what we heard during engagement activity only.

We recognise that language associated with sexual orientation and gender identity can be complex and potentially exclusionary. In addition, not all readers will be familiar with these terms and people will have different preferences as to usage. The Inquiry’s project team analysed the language used by 50 leading LGBTQ+ support organisations to identify the most common terms used by organisations working with people who identify as LGBTQ+. At the same time, we recognise the limitations of using ‘LGBTQ+’ as an umbrella term, as well as the limitations of specific categories within that acronym. We have also used participants’ and organisations’ own words when describing their sexual orientation or gender identity.

I hope this goes some way to explaining some of the rationale behind the engagement activity and that there are some positives to come from the publication of this work, limitations aside.

We felt this was a reasonable and considered reply. We could understand that within an engagement report there was some justification in using the preferred language of victims and that this required sensitivity, rather than being a reflection of the beliefs of IICSA.

The problem is that such concepts as ‘LGBTQ+ children’ appear in the final published report from IICSA, along with the repeated claim that the development of a trans identity as a response to sexual abuse experienced as a child is a ‘myth’ – a point we challenged in our letter.

A statement like this: “the challenges that can make LGBTQ+ children and young people vulnerable to sexual abuse…These included that society’s views of LGBTQ+ victims and survivors are often built on harmful myths and stereotypes” only bolsters activist attempts to silence any questioning. Anyone who self-identifies under the ‘LGBTQ+’ umbrella becomes exempt from scrutiny – even though that ‘plus’ has no ceiling and could include anyone.

This language places a major child sexual abuse inquiry unwittingly in collusion with a lobby that directly targets children – online and through schools – with an extremist ideology that undermines child safeguarding at the most fundamental level. It gives credibility to the idea of the trans (or queer +) child and bestows an authority to the groups that ’adultify’ children in this way.

In 2022 when the final report was published the silencing of debate on this issue should have been obvious to anyone concerned with the safeguarding of children. Accusations of ‘moral panic’ or ‘transphobia’ – or, frequently, ‘culture wars’ – should have been recognised as a tactic to silence necessary scrutiny of new claims or ideas about children promoted by any adult lobby movement.

There are unavoidable comparisons between the tactics of the trans lobby and how the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) operated, as Sarah Ditum has written about. Both attached themselves to more popular civil rights causes and infiltrated government and public agencies under a ‘progressive’ banner of ‘rights.’ But there are more worrying similarities.

Through the addition of the ‘TQ+’ to the ‘LGB’, the gay rights movement has been infiltrated by heterosexual men with fetishistic interests who call themselves ‘women’, ‘lesbian’ or ‘queer.’ Children identifying themselves within this group are open to the risk of being led to some very dark places online.

Both movements target the youngest children: 4 yr-olds ‘understand their gender identity,’ 4 yr-olds can ‘consent to sex.’ In both cases claims of respecting children’s ‘agency’ are used in service of adult political aims. Both movements erase sexual boundaries: between adult and child and between male and female.

Placing children within the group ‘LGBTQ+’ obscures the fact that they are children. In the case of the trans movement children have been encouraged towards unnecessary medical intervention with lifelong harmful effects, but it is not only these children who have been harmed.

We have seen enough press reports of paedophiles and child sex abusers who identify as ‘women’, and trans influencers online cajoling children to contact them privately if their families don’t ‘understand’ them, to know that teaching children to accept adult males as women if they say so (and even to be ‘allies’) is a safeguarding risk. The trans movement has created an open door for predators to access young girls under false pretences.

We felt it was pointless to write to IICSA again after the final report was published. It is important to note that the failure to ask the necessary questions to safeguard children in this area is systemic throughout children’s services and charities. It is time for adults in positions of child protection to be less credulous and more suspicious when the next movement comes along claiming to be experts on children while going against everything we know about child development and child safeguarding.

When certain groups – or the latest societal belief – becomes immune to scrutiny, that’s when the red flags are missed. If we don’t recognise that then we are destined to repeat mistakes made in the past and more children will be harmed.