Spare Me Woke Celebrities
Daniel Radcliffe parades his bleeding heart conscience. If only he, and other woke celebrities, could engage their brains instead they'd do us all a favour, especially gender non conforming youth.
“I didn’t know trans was a thing until I was like 15 or 16”, says the young black transwoman in an assembly of sound clips in the tease at the top of a new film from the Trevor Project in which Daniel Radcliffe talks to trans and non-binary young people. Brace yourself for…some performative allyship.
You probably know the Trevor Project is a hugely wealthy and influential charity in the US that campaigns to reduce the level of suicide of LGBTQ+ youth. Weirdly, the more it campaigns, the more it raises the issue, the more it weeps performatively, the more it asks celebrities to weep too…the more the suicide rates rise. Or so the Trevor Project implies.
In fact the *actual* suicide rates don’t rise. The rising rate that the Trevor Project claims is happening is in suicidal thoughts and is based on surveys of LGBTQ+ young people conducted by LGBTQ+ groups (stop me if you’ve guessed the punch line ) like the Trevor Project where they’ve been asked how recently they felt suicidal, and how suicidal they’ve felt. The surveys measure suicidality, which when you think about it is a rather different thing.
While it would not surprise me to discover that gay and trans kids are slightly more suicidal than straight kids ..whether this is really a measure of their experience of transphobia or homophobia is a moot point. Do happy gay kids take part in surveys for the Trevor Project? And if they do, is it possible they are subject to subtle, and sometimes none too subtle, framing in the surveys themselves? The curse of all surveys is the leading question.
My skepticism about the objectivity of these surveys is based on my experience of observing charities and campaign groups of all sorts who have a profound vested interest in exaggerating a problem which they are raising money to solve. For example, ever since I was a kid, the water vole has been declining in numbers. Or so we’ve been told.
I remember worrying …50 years ago when I was solemnly informed it was on the brink of extinction. Yet like Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox the more the vole approaches extinction it never gets there.
Anyway, let’s get back to the Trevor Project. Bare in mind, all actual experts on suicide say that it can rarely be blamed on a single factor. How could anyone know, for sure, whether an individual, young gay or trans person committed suicide …because of homophobia or transphobia….unless they wrote a suicide letter saying just that. So we’re left with kids who are constantly fed the line that trans or gay kids are more suicidal who carry out surveys about their suicidal thoughts, sometimes from years ago, conducted by organisations which would likely consider it an enormous waste of money and time if they discovered suicidality was dropping.
My hunch that the whole field is unreliable is underpineed by the fact that I can’t remember the last time any charity produced a report that was essentially good news. I bet you can’t either. Let’s just say, charitably, so to speak, these surveys are subject to many variables that the LGBTQ+ groups don’t appear to be particularly assiduous at excluding.
At 1 minute 40 seconds in the Trevor Project film the young black transwoman says at age 14 “she” had come out as openly gay. Next up a transman says “he” too thought “he” was gay and then he realised he was trans. A vocabulary and examples were newly provided therefore to these kids at age 15 or 16 which changed their minds. They were not gay any more. It’s a story repeated through the show. And here’s the rub. Daniel Radcliffe says he wants to help gender non-conforming youth. But he’s uncritically celebrating a mental health crisis. Most, if not all of these kids, are on powerful cross-sex hormones which have extreme effects on their minds, never mind their bodies. Some of them will have been on puberty blockers before that.
Talking of hormones. Why is this medicalisation not something that a celebrity with genuine integrity might at least question. After all, it’s being celebrated in a film by a charity which had to fire its CEO only in November 2022 for being linked to Big Pharma.
Amit Paley helped the Sacklers push opioids. He later recruited Sam Brinton to front a conversion therapy campaign that turned out to be full of lies. Brinton made up a contradictory, cock and bull story about being tortured that has now fallen apart.
The Trevor Project's campaign with Brinton was the model for the UK campaign that's still running. Brinton's lies only came out when he was fired by the Biden administration after being charged with stealing women's luggage from multiple airports.
The point of the conversion therapy ban Brinton and Paley ran was to enforce affirmation of gender identity so that any kid who wants puberty blockers has to get them. Yes, it's a pro-Pharma campaign that will be hugely lucrative for Big Pharma. Guess who did research to back such a ban?
That'll be the Trevor Project itself which produced garbage research full of holes and unsupported claims that puberty blockers massively reduce suicide rates. They don't. Of course mainstream media in the Us in particular repeated the claims uncritically. I’ve posted about this before but you can read the thread on twitter here.
Suffice to say that when it conducted its survey the Trevor Project got the young people to choose from a menu that included all these gender identities.
If they weren’t confused and depressed before they started the survey they would be by the time they finished it. It’s a well known discovery of behavioural economics that people prefer a choice …up to a very limited number like three or four. Many more than that and our minds get overwhelmed. Good work Trevor Project!
Two years ago in defence of the work of the Trevor Project, Radcliffe cited "health care associations" who back its campaigns on blockers. But these so-called "experts" are actually complicit in appallingly low standards of care for trans people. Here are just a few examples.