Opening plenary at the Genspect conference in Lisbon

Today, finally the Genspect conference in Lisbon began. Below is the speech I delivered to open the day. It was a great first day - thankfully!

Hello everyone and welcome to Genspect’s third international conference. I’ll start with some good news! Last year at our conference in Denver we launched a draft version of the Gender Framework to put forward a comprehensive model that offers a non-medicalised approach to gender dysphoria while at the same time prioritising the safety of all and upholding the right to same sex spaces. And I’m delighted to say that this year we have a publishing deal for our Gender Framework; and so our book will be available in all good bookshops in 2025!

Although it’s customary to thank people after a conference, I, along with many others, would like to extend a special thanks to Jo. She organized the entire event with great care, managed the logistics, and ensured that everything ran smoothly for everyone.

Also I would like to mention that we are launching the beginning of our Pilot College Project on Substack today. Although the issue of social transition in schools needs a lot of attention, it is typically at college where many young people actually medically transition – generally as a result of an inappropriate fast-tracking of the medical approach to trans identity rather than an appreciation for health and well-being. And so the Genspect team have created a system whereby parents can check out the trans policies and attitudes of any given college in a rated system of either strong, moderate or none - in the US so they can make an informed choice about where to send their child. We have launched 10 states in the US today and will launch 10 more states every week for the next few weeks. This is a big project and we appreciate your input -  this project will only be as good as the parents make it and so we really encourage additional comments on our Substack about any given college.

There are a couple of projects being launched today: the website www.parentsofdesisters.info – sharing stories and offering hope and practical advice to other parents with children going through similar experiences launches this weekend. It’s so great to see such a practical resource for parents of gender-distressed kids.

Today also marks the launch of the inaugural LGB Alliance in Portugal. I’ve already spoken to LGB Alliance Portugal on YouTube earlier this week and their excited positivity is infectious for someone like me who has become jaded by too many years in the gender trenches.

As you may know, we are a large tent organisation. We believe that the trans phenomenon touches on so many strands of society that it is imperative to understand the wider lens, if you will, if we are to properly understand the issue. For this reason we seek to bring in as many disciplines as possible to speak on this issue.

In our programme speaking this weekend we have at least

·       3 psychotherapists

·       2 psychoanalysts

·       1 Counsellor

·       3 psychiatrists

·       2 clinical psychologists

·       2 sociologists

·       1 Director of a Therapeutic Boarding School

·       1 teacher, 1 retired teacher

·       1 politician

·       3 researchers

·       1 pediatrician

·       1 Evolutionary Biologist

·       2 GPs  

·       1 feminist campaigner

·       1 philosopher

·       1 public policy expert in policy for medicine

·       2 barristers (1 specialising in Child Protection Law and 1 specializing in employment and human rights

·       1 choreographer (because every confernece needs a choreographer)

·       1 activist

·       2 comedians

·       1 journalist

·       2 bioethicists

·       3 documentary-makers

Ø  2 parents of kids who have medically transitioned

Ø  1 wife of a man who transitioned

Ø  1 detransitioner

Ø  1 child of a father who has transitioned

3 leaders of Lesbian Gay Alliance – that’s UK and Iceland and Portugal 

The founder of Transgender Trend

Director of Sex Matters

Chair of Can-SG

Co-founder of SEGM

Co-founders and members of Thoughtful Therapists

Co-founders and members of Therapy First

Co-Founder of the Lesbian Project

2 Leaders of the Centre of Bioethics

Director of the National Progress Alliance

Founding Faculty Advisor for the University of Austin

Director of MCC Brussels

Director of Free Speech Union

Director of the Academy of Ideas

Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

3 Members of the Killarney Group Think Tank

Member of Critical Therapy Antidote

Member of We are Fair Cop

Founder of Themis

Founder of Children of Transitioners

Founder of Restore Childhood (Natalya)

President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest

Founder of the Rosie Kay Dance Company and K2CO

Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Leader at Beyond Trans

Chair of the Danish Rainbow Council

Commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission

Global Population Health Summit

So it’s fair to say that we are a distinguished group of people here. I’ve often been accused for being too ambitious. However I believe that every single one of us here should be extremely ambitious. We need us all to be ambitious. We have been suddenly faced with a overwhelmingly pervasive societal phenomenon  that is causing significant destruction.

We have the expertise in our disparate fields and what we need to do is to keep lifting each other’s voices, keep speaking out, keep trying to avoid the million landmines, and most of all, collaborate together with recognition of our differences but also acknowledgement of the need for co-belligerence in the face of threats to the health and wellbeing of children and vulnerable people.

There is a very wide range of knowledge in this room. And the point over these next few days is not to agree – the big-thing-point is that civilised and engaged disagreement tends to bring about better outcomes and that is what we are looking for at the Bigger Picture conference.

At Genspect we don’t see very much value in everyone coming together in silos and deciding that we’re all brilliant. We are wary of meetings where the psychologists all agree on the best treatment paths. Likewise, meetings where feminists cheer each other on the best way to challenge the patriarchy does not fill us with satisfaction but rather with concern. The same goes for the philosophers, the lawyers, the teachers etc.

We don’t think it is helpful to agree that we all have it sussed. Rather, we promote humility about our lack of knowledge as we try to comprehend the trans juggernaut that has dismantled many people’s lives in ways that are basically incomprehensible for most people. Anyone who has a confident assessment of this situation, has probably taken a simplistic view.  We are not even halfway through understanding this issue and so now is the time for questions, not answers.

If you think that all we need is proper clinical assessment, the correct diagnosis and the most suitable treatment framework is all that we need to get us out of this, then you are missing something. If you believe that the detrans lawsuits will sort out this issue, then you are missing something. If you think that tearing down the patriarchy will show us the way out of this mess, again, you are missing something. Same goes for sociology, and again for journalism – even for comedy.

Not only that, but if you think that the trans phenomenon developed in isolation and is not reflective of some wider issues in society, then again, I believe that you are missing something. And I reckon this weekend will show us exactly how the trans phenomenon is part of a wider cultural issue that needs our attention.

Few among us, if any of us, expected or wanted to spend our days and nights thinking about trans issues. If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be standing here, I’d have laughed at you. Well, here we are. I had an enjoyable life before I got into this thing. I worked as a psychotherapist and I wrote books on mental health issues. But that was in the olden days when society kind of made some sort of sense. Then, over the least ten years or so, the developed world seems to have got itself wound up in a maelstrom of reactionary overthinking that is causing way more harm than good.

Thankfully the collective work of the people here today has called into question this new way of thinking and people are beginning to wake up to the reality that nodding along and affirming everything an ill and vulnerable person says is not necessarily kind and is not necessarily helpful.  

Variations of toxic empathy and toxic compassion have led too many well-meaning people astray and this weekend we will hear from leading thinkers why and how this has happened and also, what we can do now that we are here.

Finally – the research is in. The Cass Review has demonstrated that there is no quality evidence to support the medical transition of children or vulnerable people. Now that we have this information we need to use it wisely as it has become clear that an inappropriate trans-affirmative approach has been embedded into policies across the world from the WHO, to the EU, to the DSM, the Endocrine Society. It will take many years to dismantle these policies that have been created upon low quality, biased and shoddy research.   

We are perhaps at the end of the beginning stage of this phenomenon. Every time we climb Everest, we find another mountain beyond it. We have released books, peer-reviewed studies,  podcasts and films, the WPATH Files have come out, the  Cass Review has been published, and yet the further along we go, the more we discover to unpack.

There have been and there will be many more mistakes as we stumble along trying our best to point to the issues. However if we can work together, in good faith and also in acknowledgement in our differences of opinion, then one day we will properly understand and expose the terrible work and the unnecessary pain that is being caused by trans-affirmative so-called “gender medicine”.

As we all know, this is a difficult field to work in. The fact that so much of this issue has been played out on Twitter is very unfortunate. But thankfully we, as a movement, are coming of age. We’re moving beyond the Twitter wars into more substantial work and it’s not before time.

Although this movement started on Twitter, there it cannot remain. Twitter crystallises conflict. It creates disunity. Most serious contributors to a field are not wasting their time on Twitter. Now that’s not to say there are very definitely exceptions to this rule and some of those exceptions are sitting here today.

Nevertheless, it is true to say that in-fighting on Twitter is seldom a helpful way to make the world a better place. During the weekend we will hear from people such as Andrew Doyle and Peter Boghossian about the handling the new puritans and learning how to have impossible conversations.  We’ll also hear from Matias Desmet about mass formation psychology and the importance of speaking the truth at a time of propaganda.

I have been studying the history of trans issues and it turns out that trans issues have always been pretty warlike. Way back in the 1960s and 70s radical feminists were at war with transwomen who were encroaching on female spaces. The difference then was that the numbers were fewer and the trans lobby was not so well funded, nor was it celebrated in society. And there certainly weren’t droves of young, vulnerable teenagers attending clinics seeking medical transition back then.

Some of you here may remember the ruckus that unfolded on Twitter over the man in the blue dress after our conference in Denver. And yet there have been much more strident attacks in this field. Way back in 1973 there were fisticuffs at a conference just like this!

It was the Third Annual Symposium on Gender Identity – imagine that, 1973! -  and the psychologist John Money was the Chair and Key Speaker at the event. At the time  John Money was high on his own supply and espousing the triumphs of the David Reimer case. It was all lies as we now know, and it ended in the tragic death of David Reimer and his twin brother, Brian, but at the time, no one knew differently, and John Money’s theories were being lauded as akin to Darwin’s theories on evolution.

But there were dissenters too. Paul McHugh from Johns Hopkins University spoke to me on Zoom a few months aback and he described to me how John Money started working in Johns Hopkins with a promising career but over the years disintegrated into a sexual degenerate.

Milton Diamond, a young researcher from the Bronx who was more often known as Mickey Diamond, was following John Money’s work in the 1960s and 70s. He could not accept that John Money’s theories made any sense and he called attention to Money’s shoddy research in journal articles.

Although Mickey Diamond was not invited to this Symposium on Gender Identity held in Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia, yet, much like myself or someone like Eliza Mondegreen moseying into the WPATH conference, Mickey Diamond decided to attend and have a nosey to hear what Money had to say.

At a posh cocktail reception during the conference John Money spotted Mickey Diamond from across the room and couldn’t contain himself. “Mickey Diamond, I hate your fucking guts,” he bawled across the room to a stunned audience. And then there was an altercation where John Money apparently slugged Mickey Diamond in the jaw! While Mickey Diamond just kept saying “The data is not there.”

If I was over at WPATH today and somebody slugged me in the jaw, I would be saying the exact same thing :”The data is not there.” The data has never been there. There is no quality evidence to support these radical and irreversible medical interventions. We, as a movement, have searched high and low for the evidence. There is none.

The data is still not there. Although we have moved on from physical fights, the twitter brawls appear to be sometimes just as distressing.  

And yet we need us all. We need every single expert, every single different point of view and we need all these organisations too. And we need the freedom to theorise and disagree, discuss and come to better theories as a result. This is a field very much in its infancy, it does not benefit from paranoid reactionaries pouncing on every attempt to improve things.

WPATH are here in Lisbon. We have, of course, invited them to join a good faith  discussion with Peter Boghossian. They, of course, in typical WPATH fashion, didn’t reply. Indeed the only correspondence we seem to receive from WPATH these days is through their legal team.  

Nonetheless, we are thrilled that delegates from the WPATH conference have taken us up on our offer of free tickets to WPATH members and they have joined us at our conference today. We welcome WPATh delegates. We invite you to ask all the difficult questions you might have and we don’t profess to know all the answers. Rather we encourage humility and acceptance that nobody yet knows what exactly is the most appropriate treatment, if any, for the gender distressed young person today.

Of course we need disagreements so we can come to better outcomes. And we also need bucketloads of hard work and ambition. Otherwise we will be minnowed out by a very wealthy lobby that does not accept any criticism.

What we don’t need - what we could all do without - are bad faith pile-ons that presume every mistake, every stumble, is some sort of indisputable evidence that we are shills of WPATH and that we secretly want to trans every man, woman and child. 

Because of course we don’t. Everyone who has studied Genspect’s work will know that we are seeking a non-medicalised approach to gender dysphoria. We don’t believe that a person’s sense of gender identity needs to be medicalised. Indeed we believe that a non-medical approach is a better way to treat gender issues.

Everyone in this room is asking thought-provoking questions and they should be heard. We have a great programme with brilliant speakers. Just today we’ll be hearing from the inimitable Bev Jackson about the “Good the Bad and the Diabolical” in the gay rights movement. The pediatrician Dr Jula Mason will speak about the complexities of brain development during adolescence while Eldur from Iceland will speak about the dangers of self ID, coming from Ireland as I do, this is a subject close to my heart.

And we’re going to kick things off in just a few minutes with our keynote speaker, Mia Hughes. I first met Mia, of course, on Twitter, but I really got to know her over the last year, as we worked together and met many times in person to help to launch the WPATH Files.

I guess all of you here know that Mia is the writer of the extraordinary WPATH Files that were released last March. Today Mia is going to speak about another topic that is close to my heart “Gender Dysphoria: An Incomplete Diagnosis.” I have a LOT of thoughts about this – I believe the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is a mess – gender identity disorder was a much better ift in my opinion… but I absolutely can’t wait to hear Mia’s presentation. So put your hands together for a big clap for Mia Hughes!