Susie Green is a British gender rights activist who focuses on transgender youth. Green helped her child Jackie medically transition as a minor, including gender affirming surgery in 2010 at age 16. Green was involved in the British charity Mermaids as a trustee from 2011 to 2015, then as CEO from 2016 to 2022.
Background
Susie Marie Green was born in December 1957. She was an IT manager for Citizens Advice from 2002 to 2015. Green lives in Yorkshire, and is married to Tim Green. They have four adult children, including twins.
Green gave a 2017 talk at TEDx Truro that was criticized by anti-trans activists. Green later removed the video.
Green was a consultant on the 2o18 ITV drama Butterfly and helped shape the WPATH chapter on children and adolescents.
She got involved at Mermaids in 2000 because her daughter Jackie was trying to navigate gender transition as a minor. During her time as CEO, the debate about transgender youth intensified, particularly following a ÂŁ500,000Â grant from the National Lottery and corporate sponsorships.
Under Green, Mermaids launched the first legal challenge of its kind against the LGB Alliance, a trans-exclusionary charity which is critical of “gender ideology.” Mermaids sought to end its charitable status.
In late 2022, Mermaids was hit with several setbacks. New Mermaids trustee Jacob Breslow resigned after a 2011 presentation he gave at a conference for minor-attracted persons held by B4U-ACT came to light. Complaints from staff led to an outside audit conducted by DEI consultants the Social Justice Collective. Days after Green resigned, UK’s Charity Commission launched a statutory inquiry into Mermaids after reports that they offered chest binders to teens whose parents opposed their transitions.
Green has been recognized for her contributions to the trans community on several occasions, including an event at Buckingham Palace. In 2016 she won the Diversity Champion Award. In 2023 Green joined GenderGP as project manager on the GenderGP Trans Youth Fund.
SJC (2022). EDI Audit: Recommendations and Next Steps. https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/EDI-Audit_-Recommendations-and-Next-Steps.pdf
Reverend Alexander Faludy is is a British Anglican priest who has written about trans issues in Hungary.
Background
Alexander “Alex” Faludy was born in 1983 and is grandchild of Hungarian poet György Faludy. Faludy is the youngest student admitted to Cambridge despite living with dyslexia. After earning a bachelor’s degree, Faludy did graduate studies at Oxford, then trained for the priesthood at Mirfield. Faludy served as parish priest in Newcastle from 2008 to 2018.
Trans coverage
Faludy has discussed the anti-LGBTQ policies enacted under Fidesz, Hungary’s right-wing populist party. They have rules prohibiting “promotion to minors” of subjects related to LGBTQ people. Faludi described in UnHerd how Hungary has also made legal change of gender impossible:
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer who writes on international politics, religion, culture, and humanism.
2020 UnHerd article
Using a question India Willoughby posed on Big Brother about dating transgender people, Leonard wrote for anti-transgender publication UnHerd about the so-called “cotton ceiling” debate about cisgender women who won’t date trans women.
Unfortunately, two years on, the ethics of refusing transsexual people as dating partners remains a fraught subject: questions such as âIs it transphobic for lesbians not to date trans women?â are being discussed online. Again, they tend to arouse strong reactions. Some lesbians, for instance, have expressed concerns that raising the question of whether they âshouldâ be attracted to trans women is a surreptitious attempt to pressure, manipulate and guilt trip them into shifting their sexual boundaries into unwanted sex in the name of being more âopenâ.
Of course, there are lesbians who are reluctant to date trans women because they believe they are not actually women (or at least not women in the same way biologically born women are)â. But itâs worth remembering that lesbians have endured a long history of attempts to control their sexuality, whether through hideous practices such as religious indoctrination, conversion therapy or âcorrectiveâ rape to âmake them straightâ. And why focus the attack on lesbians, when many straight men would also reject trans women as a potential mate?
This obviously provokes a wider question: when does a preference become a convenient cover for bigotry and prejudice? On some level, as this tweet declares, âdating is discriminationâ. But the question provoked by that Big Brother episode was: when is discrimination acceptable, and when is it unacceptable?
References
Leonard, Ralph (October 7, 2020). Is dating discrimination? UnHerd https://unherd.com/2020/10/the-dangerous-politics-of-desire/
Melanie Anne Phillips is an American artist, author, musician, filmmaker, software developer, and activist. Phillips is one of the most important historical figures in online transgender resources.
Background
Melanie Anne Phillips was born on February 20, 1953 and grew up in Burbank, California. After attending film school at University of Southern California, Phillips worked in film and television, including directing a horror feature in 1985. Phillips married, and they had two children.
Phillips, Chris Huntley, and Stephen Greenfield began a narrative software project called Write Brothers, which evolved into Dramatica interactive story engine. In 1997, Phillips founded Storymind to develop additional narrative development products.
Transgender activism
In 1989, Phillips began a gender transition and kept a detailed journal of the process. Over time, Phillips published the journal online, gathered an extensive collection of transition resources, and produced instructional videos that were available on physical media.
Phillips was an important community leader at America Online (AOL) and helped build out the transgender resources available there. Phillips moved these resources to a standalone site called Heart Corps in 1997.
Phillips has lived in several communities on the West Coast and continues to create music, photography, writing, and art. Outside of this public online persona, Phillips is a very private person in real life.
References
For a full bibliography of all 86 books published to date, see the Amazon author page for Melanie Anne Phillips: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Melanie-Anne-Phillips/author/B0744CGDLV
Phillips, Melanie Anne; Huntley Chris (2004). Dramatica: A New Theory of Story. ISBN 9780918973047
Phillips, Melanie Anne (2013). Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic! ISBN 9781489503541
Phillips, Melanie Anne (2014). Images and Visions: The Photography of Melanie Anne Phillips. ISBN 9781495283321
Phillips, Melanie Anne (2017). Raised by Wolves: Volume One in the Transcendental Trilogies Nine-Volume Set. ISBN 9781521859551
Esocoff, Sarah (). “Melanie Speaks.” Sounds Gay https://pod.link/1686975383/episode/27d697cd2d82b16116eb641e4da9f681
Terrell was born in ~1984 and grew up in a conservative Evangelical Christian environment.
Terrell self-identifies as having a controversial disease called “autoandrophilia”: “I found gay men most attractive, and fantasized about being one.” Terrell transitioned in ~2011 and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Activism
In 2021 Terrell was reportedly radicalized by J.K. Rowling.
Terrell co-founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance website in 2020.
Paglia has made a number of statements critical of the transgender rights movement. Paglia has said, “No one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity.”
Paglia has also called trans healthcare for youth “child abuse.”
Background
Camille Anna Paglia waas born on April 2, 1947 in Endicott, New York. As a child, Paglia occasionally used the names Anastasia, Stacy, and Stanley.
Paglia earned a bachelor’s degree from Binghamton University in 1968, followed by a master’s degree and a doctorate from Yale in 1972. Paglia was menotred by Harold Bloom and inspired by Susan Sontag’s role as a celebrity public intellectual.
Paglia is best known the the 1990 book Sexual Personae (based on Paglia’s dissertation and originally titled The Androgynous Dream). Paglia is also known for criticism of feminist movements, thus winning praise from Christina Hoff Sommers, Germaine Greer, and other anti-trans activists.
Paglia and artist Alison Maddex were in a relationship, and Paglia adopted Maddex’s child before the two split up.
Dan Carlin is an American podcaster and author considered by some to be part of the intellectual dark web.
Carlin has been conspicuously silent on the historic civil rights struggle of trans and gender diverse people.
Background
Daniel “Dan” Carlin was born November 14, 1965 to parents involved in film and TV production. Carlin earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Colorado, Boulder in 1989. Carlin worked as a journalist in Los Angeles.
Carlin began podcasting in 2005, eventually hosting three shows: Hardcore History, Hardcore History: Addendum, and Common Sense.
Intellectual dark web
Analysis of the DanCarlin subreddit suggests that the connection to the intellectual dark web is weak.
Carlin has been a frequent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience. Nicholas Quah stated in Vulture that both “possess politics that can be fairly hard to describe, but typically run counter to the dominant strings of liberal politics.”Â
In addition to connections to Joe Rogan, Carlin has collaborated with Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Tim Ferriss
Mountjoy, Anthony (Jun 6, 2018). Crawling The Intellectual Dark Web.Verboten Publishing https://medium.com/verboten-publishing/deep-data-of-the-intellectual-dark-web-5c323ee782b4
Andrea Long Chu is an American writer and critic whose work frequently focuses on sex and gender.
Chu won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2023.
Background
Chu was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1992 and grew up in a Christian household in Asheville, North Carolina. Chu earned a bachelor’s degree from Duke University in 2014 and a master’s degree from New York University in 2016.
Chu has written numerous book reviews and interviewed many notable public figures.
Writing on sex and gender
Much of Chu’s work is deliberately provocative. In 2018, Chu presented two works on sissy subculture and wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times titled “My New Vagina Wonât Make Me Happy.”
The thesis for Chu’s 2019 book Females is that “everyone is female and everyone hates it.”
Whoâs Afraid of Gender? review (2024)
In 2024, Chu reviewed Whoâs Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler in New York Magazine. Chu gives an excellent overview of the influence of Butler’s work on transgender rights. The piece is also notable for tracing the recent history of the anti-transgender movement. It lays part of the blame on those who embrace disease models of our community: “We must be able to defend this desire clearly, directly, and â crucially â without depending on the idea of gender.”
Chu notes the same tipping point in anti-trans activism that many trans people immediately noted:
In 2018, The Atlantic published a long cover story by the reporter Jesse Singal called âWhen Children Say Theyâre Trans,â focusing on the clinical disagreements over how to treat gender-questioning youth. The story provided a template for the coverage that would follow it. First, it took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights.
Chu identifies three groups that compose the anti-trans bloc in America today:
the religious right
gender critical feminists (TERFs)
trans-agnostic reactionary liberals (TARLs)
Chu notes that the key outlet for the third group is the New York Times:
The Times is not alone; it is one of many respectable publications, including The Atlantic and TheEconomist, engaged in sanitizing the ideas promoted by TARLs in the more reactionary corners of the media landscape. Here one finds journalists like Singal, Matthew Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Helen Lewis, Meghan Daum, and, of course, former Times staffer Bari Weiss. Many of these writers live in self-imposed exile on Substack, the newsletter platform, where they present themselves as brave survivors of cancellation by the woke elites. But they are not a marginal force.
We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. When the TARL insinuates again and again that the sudden increase of trans-identified youth is âunexplained,â he is trying to bait us into thinking trans rights lie just on the other side of a good explanation.
I am speaking here of a universal birthright: the freedom of sex. This freedom consists of two principal rights: the right to change oneâs biological sex without appealing to gender and the right to assume a gender that is not determined by oneâs sexual biology. One might exercise both of these rights toward a common goal â transition, for instance â but neither can be collapsed into the other.
Coleman, Madeleine Leung (March 15, 2024). Gender Identity Is Not Enough, [interview about Chu’s piece] The Critics / New York https://nymag.com/newsletter/2024/03/the-critics-march-15-2024.html
Chu AL (2019). The Impossibility of Feminism. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 30, no. 1 (Spring 2019). https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-7481232
Chu AL (November 24, 2018). My New Vagina Wonât Make Me Happy.New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html
Chu AL (November 5, 2018). No One Wants It.Affidavit https://www.affidavit.art/articles/no-one-wants-it
Chu AL (2018). On Liking Women.n+1 30 (Winter 2018): 47â62. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/
Chu AL (2018). Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans? Queer Disruptions 2 Columbia University, New York, NY March 1â2, 2018.
Chu AL (2018). Pornographic Spectatorship, or, Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans? 2018 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association UCLA, Los Angeles, CA March 29âApril 1, 2018.
Chu AL (2017). The Wrong Wrong Body: Notes on Trans Phenomenology. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 1 (February 2017): 141â52. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3711613
O’Brien, Michelle Esther (November 2, 2018). Interview with Andrea Long Chu. New York Public Library Community Oral History Project. http://oralhistory.nypl.org/interviews/andrea-long-chu-lpf5er
Kathleen Kingsbury is an American editor responsible for the surge in anti-transgender opinion pieces in the New York Times during the 2020s. Kingsbury is also responsible for giving columns and space to staunch anti-trans activists like David French and Pamela Paul.
No transgender journalist has appeared on the New York Times masthead since its founding in 1851. In 2023 the San Francisco Chronicle cited a Times employee who said the organization has no trans reporters.
Background
Kathleen “Katie” Kingsbury was born in 1979 and grew up in Portland, Oregon. Kingsbury earned a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in 2001.
Kingsbury was a reporter at Metro Boston for a year, then a research assistant at Tufts University for a year. Kingsbury earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 2004. In 2004 Kingsbury worked at CNN and Time before working as a stringer for a year at BusinessWeek.
From 2009-2010, Kingsbury was a contributing writer at The Daily Beast, then served as a program officer at Open Society Foundations for a year. From 2009 to 2014 Kingsbury wrote for Reuters and Time. Kingsbury joined the editorial team at the Boston Globe, moving into management roles from 2013 to 2017. Kingsbury joined the New York Times editorial page team in 2017 and was promoted to Editorial Page Editor in 2020.
Criticism by journalism watchdog FAIR
Opinion page editor Kathleen Kingsbury (4/26/21) once wrote of the Times Opinion team, âWe have our thumb on our scale in the name of progress, fairness and shared humanity.â In this political moment, when control over trans lives has become an increasingly central political and legal debate, and with no trans writers among their stable of columnists or contributing writers, the Paper of Record is paying a cisgender white woman to regularly voice anti-trans arguments. Their thumb is on the scale, all rightâbut not in the way Kingsbury would like us to believe.
2023 response to over 1,000 trans-supportive colleagues
On February 15, 2023, over 1,000 New York Times contributors signed an open letter objecting to the Times’ increasingly hostile coverage of transgender issues.
On the same day, GLAAD delivered a second letter and organized a protest in front of Times headquarters.
Kingsbury chose to publish a piece by anti-trans activist Pamela Paul defending anti-trans activist J.K. Rowling the very next day.
The next day, Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Kingsbury warned their colleagues they were violating company policy. Their warning conflates the two letters and dismisses the ethical concerns of their colleagues as “advocacy.”
Colleagues,
Yesterday, the New York Times received a letter delivered by GLAAD, an advocacy group, criticizing coverage in The Times of transgender issues.
It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism. In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort. Their protest letter included direct attacks on several of our colleagues, singling them out by name.
Participation in such a campaign is against the letter and spirit of our ethics policy. That policy prohibits our journalists from aligning themselves with advocacy groups and joining protest actions on matters of public policy. We also have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such attacks.
Our coverage of transgender issues, including specific pieces singled out for attack, is important, deeply reported, and sensitively written. The journalists who produced those stories nonetheless have endured months of attacks, harassment and threats. The letter also ignores The Timesâ strong commitment to covering all aspects of transgender issues, including the life experience of transgender people and the prejudice and violence against them in our society. A full list of our coverage can be viewed here, and any review shows that the allegations this group is making are demonstrably false.
We realize these are difficult issues that profoundly affect many colleagues personally, including some colleagues who are themselves transgender. We have welcomed and will continue to invite discussion, criticism and robust debate about our coverage. Even when we don’t agree, constructive criticism from colleagues who care, delivered respectfully and through the right channels, strengthens our report.
We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.
We live in an era when journalists regularly come under fire for doing solid and essential work. We are committed to protecting and supporting them. Their work distinguishes this institution, and makes us proud.
Joe & Katie
2024 piece justifying another Pamela Paul article
In defending Paul, Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury defended the disproportionate number of anti-trans articles the section publishes by citing three articles that are purportedly not anti-trans:
Given the state legislative fights over trans Americans and their civil liberties and access to medical and psychological care, we have published many columns and guest essays from health professionals and activists on issues affecting trans people, as well as a focus group last year hearing from trans Americans about their lives.
Since the ex-trans movement is a single-digit minority, Kingsbury’s next 90+ greenlit articles should be on gender diverse youth who have benefited from the care that is the current US medical consensus.
Paul Thomas is a government employee and co-founder of The Leeds Salon. Thomas has complained in UnHerd about “the collaboration between the unions and management” regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the University and College Union’s “disgraceful lack of support for Kathleen Stock.”