We went to see our daughter get a school prize and it was handed to a boy called ‘Tommi’ It’s taken 20 years of women like me facing intimidation, death threats and wrecked livelihoods for the voice of sanity to be finally heard

A mother’s heartbreaking story of how teachers kept her in the dark over her 14-year-old’s transition...

Patricia and Michael were bursting with pride that their 14- year- old daughter was in line for an essay-writing prize at her annual school awards ceremony.

they arrived early to get seats with a good view of the event, held at the end of the summer term two years ago.

the couple were already aware that the large secondary school in northern England was a proud champion of the trans-rights lobby charity Stonewall, with posters celebrating ‘LGBtQ+ diversity’ plastered over the entrance hall. But nothing could have prepared them for what happened that day.

to their shock, the child who received the prize was not their daughter tania who had left home that morning.

instead, a young figure in grey trousers with fair curly hair, slicked back by gel, appeared when the headteacher called up a ‘tommi’ to the platform.

it soon dawned on the middle- class couple what was happening.

‘My daughter had changed her name and her pronouns,’ Patricia said yesterday. ‘at school, she was living as a boy and no one had told us.

‘the teachers were supporting her lifechanging decision. Some staff celebrated our daughter’s changed identity behind our backs.

‘a few had offered to put her in touch with their own adult transgender friends. She had, we discovered, become the school’s poster child for inclusivity and diversity.

‘at one stage her picture with her new name “tommi” was displayed by teachers in the school as a fine example of a transgender pupil’s success story.’

today, Patricia is still reeling from the experience. She has shared her family’s story with the Mail in light of the publication of the long-awaited cass report into NHS care for gender- questioning children and adolescents — the findings of which are expected to reshape treatment for those under the age of 18. Following this seminal review, gender-confused children will be moved away from drugs such as puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones in favour of a more ‘holistic’ approach to treatment, focusing among other things on their mental health.

it is welcome news for most parents. But Patricia is cautious. ‘the cass findings come too late for my daughter,’ she says, angrily. ‘almost all tania’s friendship group, who she speaks to online, are transgender. Most of her teachers are Stonewall supporters. School staff have even donated various pieces of second-hand male school uniform to her.’

it is the school that Patricia blames most for her daughter’s desire to change gender.

Before tania joined secondary school, she was a high-achieving, confident child — happy to play with both girls and boys.

‘She never showed any sign of gender distress. But, unfortunately, as a bright child who wanted to please her teachers, she was mercilessly bullied by other girls,’ says Patricia.

But it was only during the autumn term, after the awards ceremony, that Patricia discovered the extent of what she sees as the school’s treachery.

‘i had no information from the school. all the communication (email or otherwise) used her female pronouns and legal name.

‘i was confused, terrified and tried to remember anything that could have started this metamorphosis,’ she says.

‘i recalled that one dinner time, when she was 13, she began to discuss sexual orientation and pronouns.

‘tania then said she had been studying gender at school through what i now know is the Government-approved and compulsory “relationships and Sex Education” curriculum.

‘the daughter we love informed us she had chosen her pronouns but they were secret. My blood ran cold.’

When Patricia and Michael confronted the school after the awards ceremony, they were met with hostility.

‘the “safeguarding team” called in to see us and told us we parents had no rights. all that mattered was the “child’s voice”. We were told that the cass inquiry findings [ which had been commissioned a couple of years prior], whatever they were, would be completely disregarded by the school.’

Patricia adds: ‘During one meeting, a safeguarding teacher continued to refer to my daughter as male without any regard for our feelings. it felt personal, as though she was baiting me to see how far i could be pushed before i snapped.’

tania’s parents finally appealed for help from the school’s assistant head. they begged her to reverse the name and pronoun changes.

‘She listened to me attentively, nodding at all the right moments’, says Patricia. ‘But then she waved us out of her office, telling me that it was quite possible for a child to “safely transition”. ’

On her 16th birthday this year, without the permission of her parents, both in their 40s, tania changed her name to tommi by deed poll.

She now wears heavy-duty army shorts and a hoodie, with men’s shoes on her feet. When out, she uses a male lavatory and speaks with a deep voice to emulate an adolescent boy.

and although tania is not (yet) taking puberty- blockers or sex- change hormones, Patricia worries about her mental wellbeing.

‘She continues to live with us, but has rejected us as parents, ditto her younger sister and other members of the wider family.

‘teachers should realise that strong family connections are one of the most dominant factors in a child’s future happiness and success. they put up a wedge between the two.’

Patricia says the school has wielded enormous power over tania’s adolescent life. What has happened to her is going on in many state and private schools.

‘i cannot go near my daughter’s big red-brick building without feeling a deep sense of fear for her future.’

All names have been changed.

‘Safeguarding’ team said parents had no rights

She wears army shorts and uses male lavatory

THE damage wrought by two decades of slavish obedience to an ideological cult cannot be overstated. So many children and adolescents have been victims of the trans delusion.

They have had their bodies mutilated, their mental health wrecked, their relationships with parents and siblings destroyed, their education shattered — all based on the crazy fallacy that there is any such thing as a ‘transgender child’ or that it is possible for a prepubescent to be ‘trapped in the wrong body’.

My main emotion, as I read the Cass Review yesterday, was not relief — but anger. Yes, I’m glad the tide is finally turning against this oppressive, toxic dogma. But people like me have been speaking out against it for more than 20 years.

We have faced constant intimidation, violence, even death threats. Some of us have seen our livelihoods wrecked. Academics have been sacked, whistleblowers have been hounded out. Why has it taken so long for the voice of the Establishment to be raised in defence of sanity?

A few heroic figures have been willing to sacrifice their careers by speaking a self- evident truth — that unhappy, confused children cannot be ‘fixed’ by a toxic cocktail of medications.

This ought to be obvious: these drugs can cause deep mental damage and often physical risks. Encouraging children to live a lie, meanwhile, means creating a lifelong psychological mess.

YET far from standing up to the mob mentality, most political leaders have been craven. Last year, Sir Keir Starmer, our probable next prime minister, couldn’t commit himself: the best he could do was declare that, ‘99.9 per cent of women haven’t got a penis’, implying that one in 1,000 do.

In her measured report, Dr Hilary Cass recommends a ‘ holistic approach’ to treating young people questioning their gender identity, focusing on mental health rather than physical and medical interventions. But how can I feel relieved to read this when I’ve watched this quasi-religious movement take control of all our major governmental bodies — including the NHS?

In its worst incarnations, trans cultism is akin to the ancient belief in possession by demons. Rather than addressing complex mental health problems or hang-ups about sexuality, thousands of children have been told that their true ‘identity’ can be imprisoned within their flesh.

It’s positively medieval.

Yet this notion has infected almost every school, even at nursery level.

Last Saturday, a woman contacted me in despair after finding that her ten-year- old daughter had been allowed (perhaps encouraged) by teachers to ‘transition’ at school.

In an account with troubling echoes with the one Sue Reid recounts in the Mail today, she described how her daughter sets out each morning in a girl’s uniform, then changes into boy’s clothes on arrival at school. Teachers and classmates call her by a new, male name. She uses the boys’ bathrooms and plays sports on the boys’ teams.

Incredibly, the school gave no hint of this to her parents.

How can anyone in authority think this was right or healthy?

This poisonous, divisive trend has been spreading for years. The fact that the NHS is belatedly recognising it is hardly a cause for unbridled celebration.

I first became aware of it in 2003, when writing about the increasing normalisation of adult transexuality and its threat to women’s hard-won rights.

A charity called Mermaids, I was appalled to find, which described itself as a support group for children and teenagers with ‘gender identity disorder’, had seen a big increase in inquiries since its inception in 1995.

For several years, Mermaids had been proclaiming the existence of ‘trans children’ and recommending physical, even lifechanging, interventions to allow them to live as the opposite sex. These youngsters, some just 14, were having invasive treatments, such as puberty-blockers.

Despite the lack of knowledge about the drugs’ long- term effects, they were being prescribed to ever-younger children.

Puberty-blockers were characteristically sold as a way of ‘buying time’ for children who might decide to embrace sex- change procedures when they were older. It was, their advocates claimed, a way of ‘pushing the pause button’ on adolescence.

What bilge. It’s incredible any educated person, let alone a doctor or nurse, could ever have given that claim credence. Puberty is a period of confusion, emotional turmoil and physical discomfort — especially for girls. And, whatever sex, our bodies change. We become sexually aware and fertile. We look, feel and think differently, often from one week to the next.

Pretending that this confusing, overwhelming process can just be ‘paused’, like a videotape, is a perversion of reality.

WE DON’T yet know the full damage puberty- blockers can cause, but already we’re seeing evidence that they increase the incidence of cancers, multiple sclerosis and osteoporosis or brittle bones in young adults.

If that’s the danger after ten or 15 years, what could be the outcome after 25 or 30? I fear the irrevocable damage from these drugs is going to be much worse than we yet imagine, a medical disaster on a scale that outstrips the thalidomide scandal.

And that’s just the drugs. The irreversible medical procedures, literally carving up the sexual organs of people barely out of their teens, are shocking. How can so many have remained silent while a taxpayerfunded NHS clinic amputated young women’s breasts? So yes, I welcome the Cass Review, but only because I, like so many, have been desperate to hear any kind of official recognition that immense harm is being done to children by this collective madness.

The report begins with an overly defensive statement, promising young people that Gender Identity Development Services ( GIDS), including hormone treatments, will not be stopped.

Well, they should be. Dr Cass ought to be throwing out the notion on the first page that there is any such thing as a ‘trans child’.

We all want everyone, most of all vulnerable children, to have access to good healthcare. But puberty- blockers that put children on a pathway to sex-change surgery should not be considered healthcare.

The review acknowledges that children and adolescents coming to GIDS clinics often present with a wide range of overlapping medical and psychological problems, or ‘co-morbidities’.

Clinicians seeing these children should be alert for undiagnosed depression, eating disorders, neuro- diverse conditions such as autism and other hidden problems, as well as family issues such as sexual or physical abuse, neglect or violence in the home. Instead, transgender ideology overrules all other concerns. Very serious issues such as child sex abuse may well be going undetected in the rush to encourage children ‘be their true selves’.

But, in the activists’ eyes, being their true selves typically amounts to an obscene parody of 1950s gender norms, where ‘being a girl’ means to wear pink dresses and have pigtails and ‘ being a boy’ means to push Tonka toys through sandpits. If you break that mould, you must be in the wrong body.

We need to say it without fear. I have long doubted that there is such thing as a ‘transgender child’. The underlying causes of ‘gender dysphoria’ are mental distress, ill-health and trauma.

Yes, some adults grow up to suffer from this complicated condition, and seem to find life intolerable unless they live as the opposite sex. But children are another matter altogether: they deserve protection.

AND it is telling that the highest proportion of girls presenting as ‘trans boys’ to gender services in 2022 was in Blackpool.

This Lancashire resort also suffers the highest rate of children in care and the highest reported rate of child sexual abuse. There is a direct correlation between these horrific statistics.

Telling a child in care who has endured traumatic abuse that their real problem is their ‘gender identity’ is at odds with their sexual organs is worse than wrong- headed. It ought to be criminal.

For many years, children in care homes were prey to monsters in plain sight such as Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith. Now they are equally defenceless against fanatics in the grip of a demented doctrine, who are telling them that the way to be happy is to change their bodies with powerful drugs, starting along the path to surgical mutilation.

As long as the NHS and other government bodies hold back from fully condemning trans ideology, the fight for truth will have to be waged by individuals who are prepared to face down the mob.

I did exactly that last month, at the first conference of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender in Euston, Central London.

The attendees were made up of sensible, eminent professionals including psychologists, counsellors and doctors critical of the trans dogma. Our slogan was the time-honoured motto of all medicine, one recently forgotten by too many of its shameful practitioners: First Do No Harm.

But the baying protesters trying to shut us down by throwing smoke bombs and screaming threats were hoping to do harm, not only by calling for our blood, but through the cruelty of inflicting a mass sexual experiment on children.

Dr Hilary Cass has been at pains to stress that her review is only an interim report, with more work yet to come.

So far, what she has published does not go far enough. But I’m glad for the validation it gives to campaigners who have pleaded so long for sanity.

I’m glad, too, for the promise of more research to come. We’ve all got a long road ahead.