Breaking news tonight on the puberty blocker trial being paused after an intervention from the medicines regulator. The news came first from Hannah Barnes who explained that the Pathways team was being asked to amend the study protocol, to better reflect risks to children. The MRHA wants the minimum age to be raised to 14 but there’ve been immediate repeats of calls tonight for the entire trial to be abandoned. Here you will find breaking coverage including paywall free articles and reactions to the news, as it develops. Keira Bell and James Esses are among those demanding tonight that Wes Streeting finally gives up on the research completely.

Listen here as Hannah Barnes lists the issues which the regulator, the MHRA, is giving as its reasons for pausing the trial. Note the bias with which the Today presenter assumes she’s arguing for one side. Note also that across coverage no one has pointed out that this is the same regulator which approved the trial protocol, and nothing has changed since then.

The BBC brought out two senior editors - Hugh Pym, Health, and Alison Holt, Social Affairs - very late on a Friday night to cover it as a significant new development. Very due, but not without problems. By serendipity, as the news broke, Baroness Hilary Cass was being interviewed on Radio New Zealand. She described the intervention as ‘technical details being ironed out’. Link to listen is at the bottom of this page. She reacted more fully in this interview with the Observer on Sunday morning.

“There are no new research findings and the MHRA hasn’t presented any new evidence..It feels to me like they are responding to political pressure rather than to science..I have not changed my position an inch since I wrote my report and yet suddenly, people from the gender-critical side of the debate seem surprised or discomforted that I'm supporting a trial’

We’ll add links as they come - so far the Times, Telegraph, Independent and Evening Standard have been quick off the mark. Sky News scraped together a piece early on Saturday morning but resolutely left out any detail around the reasons why the trial is now considered dangerous. Links in the thread above.

Separately, but also on paediatric ‘transition’, Ben Appel wrote about the disturbing enthusiasm with which a ‘queer’ surgeon discusses his experimental work on children and young people. Please read his piece: This Is What They’re Doing. It’s the perfect demonstration of why gender identity activists are so opposed to any campaign for accuracy and impartiality, and have accordingly driven an extreme level of selective bias in legacy media. Only because this surgeon, Blair Peters, was speaking frankly to a person he understands to be supportive, does he open up so astonishingly about his activities in the operating theatre. Ben is a fine writer and knows when to comment, or paraphrase - and when Peters’ words speak for themselves.

Two truly shocking cases of censorship from France and Canada emerged this week.

Dora Moutot’s case was heard in Paris. She was prosecuted - literally in the dock - for saying that ‘women have to be wary of people with penises’. A chief witness was the man pictured, Marie Cau. The prosecution has asked for Dora to be fined two thousand euros, and sentenced to a civic awareness course. The judgement will be handed down in May. Here is her account of the case, on her Substack, in French. We’ve got a translation but are just waiting to publish. For such a shocking case, the lack of media interest even in France was a blow.

In Canada, Barry Neufeld was fined $750,000 dollars for ‘hate speech and discrimination’ violating British Colombia’s human rights code. He’d explained across various speeches and social media posts that (to paraphrase) gender identity is a belief not based in reality. For this, he was accused of ‘invoking negative and insidious stereotypes about 2SLGBTQ people, especially trans people, which deny their inherent dignity’.

The atrocious nature of the judgement is obvious but it’s worth noting that the linked CBC report, biased as it is, would not be able to explain what’s wrong with this outcome even if it wanted to - without itself violating the human rights code. The judgment confirms that no BC-based media will be able to publish a fact check on sex, ‘gender identity’ and trans identification without facing not just regulatory but significant financial repercussions. The tribunal which heard Neufeld’s case was not a criminal tribunal, but is nevertheless empowered to impose an obliterative penalty.

Naturally the CBC report is loaded anyway. It would be easy enough to find a contributor (Neufeld declines to comment) to deplore in a general way an example of extreme censorship. It doesn’t even try.

Here’s the National Post on the case: ‘A growing archipelago of decisions in which businesses or private individuals have been hammered with fines for alleged violations of the notion that an individual’s gender is whatever they say it is’.

The BBC is still hiding transgender homicides from readers who use it to look for stories about trans people. It did this with the child murders at Tumbler Ridge and the family annihilation by Rhode Island transgender killer Robert Dorgan, but historically it’s done the same with Scarlet Blake, Joanna Rowland-Stuart and other accused or convicted trans offenders. It’s a much wider problem than the two shootings, and is achieved by leaving off the ‘transgender people’ tag from ‘related topics’ - meaning it doesn’t appear on the trans page. It isn’t accidental. It’s consistent, and deliberate.

We’ve written to the BBC about it again, but the tagging issue has been raised with them internally and externally since at least 2020. Note also the BBC avoids directly saying that Dorgan claimed a trans identity, while it respects the murderer’s identity with similar careful avoidance of male pronouns.

We know exactly what the response will be to complaints. The BBC will use its style guide, which mandates that ‘gender identity’ isn’t mentioned unless it’s relevant. So - not relevant enough to mention, but relevant enough to go to the effort of avoidng accurate language. It’s absurd and humiliating, as is Sky’s decision deliberately to omit that Dorgan was a vocal and visible transvestite who said he was a woman.

It’s a lie to say that trans identity isn’t relevant, particularly so soon after Tumbler Ridge. It amounts to censorship - it’s certainly not up to random journalists to determine whether it matters. Just give readers the facts, and let them draw their own conclusions. The Telegraph uses accurate language as does the Sun. This isn’t bad for CTV but the obsession with not wanting to misgender a family annihilator - shared here by CBC’s report on the ‘person who opened fire’ is dispriting.

There was outrage over a Politico Europe article which accused EU-based sex discrimination and safeguarding campaigners of being right-wing, and importing a toxic culture war from the US and the UK. The journalist, Mari Eccles, is an alumni of the notoriously trans affirmative Local Democracy Reporting Service, jobs funded by the BBC. See Athena EU Forum’s complaint here.

‘Gender identity’ looks set to be specifically legally protected for the first time in a proposed new hate crime law. This appalling BBC coverage includes glowing comments from Stonewall, Galop and the MP making the proposal (it’s currently going through the Lords) but no word of caution from safeguarding campaigners.

Mini round up

- Sounds funny but it’s not. Keir Starmer's new Cabinet Secretary made staff join non-binary book club during performance review. A true devotee of lip service to gender identity theory is now the UK’s most senior civil servant. Ironic that the first woman appointed to the role appears not to know what one is. But the Telegraph thinks she’s the ‘right woman for the wrong reasons’.

‘A woman who exhibits the same attributes, like Dame Antonia, is often briefed against and described as pushy, uppity, vainglorious or a bully’

- NHS Fife made multiple outlets for using ‘cervix’ language for women and ‘men’ for men. Some of the same outlets use affirmative language elswhere themselves - consistency would be nice.

- And tonight we learn the NHS has confirmed its not going to challenge the ruling in favour of the Darlington nurses after spending £600,000 on the case. Quotes from Bethany Hutchison (such an assured media operator with immense aplomb)

- Sex Matters announced it would appeal against the High Court ruling which dismissed on technical grounds the challenge to trans people using opposite sex spaces at Hampstead Ponds

- Akua Reindorf KC wrote in the Times (share token) about the government’s failure to implement the Supreme Court ruling.

‘What is not a surprise is that this widespread defiance of the law has been brought about by a campaign of disinformation waged by trans rights activists’

- The Daily Mail reports that a woman allegedly assaulted another woman using a prosthetic ‘penis’. Grim language - ‘assigned at birth’, ‘transgender man’ etc. The Times also calls her a man as does the Telegraph. It’s a step back. Reports of female trans offences have historically not affirmed in the same way as coverage of male offences. That they’ve suddenly started to do so is concerning.

- Suella Braverman wrote in the Telegraph about her own experiences meeting the families of young trans-identified people who regret the medical interventions they underwent. It was in response to the government ‘gender’ guidance which for the first time legitimises social transition in schools.

‘There are moments in public life when the limits of politics are laid bare. What instrument of state can reverse a mastectomy? What Commons debate can restore a voice altered by hormones?..advocacy is a frail tool against irreversible medical intervention. Much of what had been done could not be undone’

- The BBC is still rejecting complaints with the claim that it’s sufficiently accurate and impartial to offer news consumers snippets of contradictory information and confusing language and invite them to guess whether the subject of the story is male or female. It’s still defending the lie that Jammie Booker was disqualified for being transgender, and the use of female pronouns for deceased child rape suspect Maddison Wilson. Icing on the sour cake - BBC complaints unit uses female pronouns in its responses.

- Another Canadian human rights tribunal ordered a hairdresser to pay $500 compensation to a non-binary would-be customer who was traumatised by the choice of a male or female haircut. ‘Migneault is 34 and does not define himself as a man or woman’.  The case got more coverage than the scandals of Dora Moutot and Barry Neufeld.