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Toby Young vs. transgender people

Toby Young is a British writer, eugenicist, and anti-transgender activist. Young is affiliated with several anti-trans projects, including Quillette, The Spectator, The Critic, Daily Mail, and the Free Speech Union.

Background

Toby Daniel Moorsom Young was born on October 17, 1963 and has one sibling. Young’s parent Sasha (1931–1993) was an author and radio producer, and parent Michael (1915–2002) was a sociologist who popularized the term “meritocracy.” After reportedly being accidentally admitted, Young received an undergraduate degree from Oxford in 1986. While there, Young founded student publication The Danube.

Young briefly worked at The Times before being fired. Young then studied at Harvard on a Fullbright scholarship, then at Cambridge from 1988 to 1990. Young left before completing a doctorate.

In 1991, Young co-founded and co-edited the Modern Review with anti-trans activist Julie Burchill and Burchill’s spouse Cosmo Landesman. It failed four years later, around the time Burchill left Landesman for Charlotte Raven. Young then moved to New York to write for Vanity Fair and was fired in 1998. Young wrote for alternative weekly The New York Press for two years and freelanced at “lad mags” before returning to the UK in 2000.

Like many anti-trans activists, Young is a self-described “porn addict” who has dabbled in crossdressing. In ~1998, Young published a piece in GQ titled “I Was a Lesbian for a Night.”

As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a lesbian.

I admit it’s a strange ambition. If I like women, what’s wrong with being a straight man? Two words: Pillow fight. Most men fantasize about spying on lesbians; I want to be one. So I became one. With the help of a crack special effects team I disguised myself as a woman and embarked on a whistlestop tour of New York’s hottest lesbian clubs. The plan was to approach gorgeous young lesbians, draw them into my confidence, then make out with them on the dance floor.

Things did not go according to plan.

Young describes going out dressed as “Jennifer” to Manhattan clubs Ruby Fruit, the G Spot event at Henrietta Hudson, and the Clit Club event at Mother. The evening ended with Young being recognized by an acquaintance.

In 2001 Young published a memoir titled How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, which Young performed as a solo stage show in 2004. From 2002 to 2007, Young wrote a restaurant column for the Evening Standard. That led to on-camera opportunities on unscripted shows, including Top Chef, Come Dine with Me, Eating with the Enemy, and Hell’s Kitchen.

In 2005, Young and Lloyd Evans cowrote Who’s the Daddy? The play is a sex farce about the David Blunkett-Kimberley Fortier Quinn scandal and the ‘Sextator’ affairs of Boris Johnson and Rod Liddle.

From 2007 to 2017. Young made hundreds of edits to the Toby Young article on Wikipedia, as well as related articles that mention Young.

Young is an advocate of free schools and set up a number of free schools in West London. Young was ennobled in 2024 as Lord Young of Acton.

Young married Caroline Bondy in 2001. They have four children.

Eugenics activism (2015–)

In 2015, Young wrote a piece that laid out the eugenic position on screening and selecting embryos for “intelligence.” Young also argued for a coming wave of “progressive eugenics,” where technology becomes available to raise “intelligence” levels through genetic manipulation.

“What I’m proposing is a form of eugenics that would discriminate in favour of the disadvantaged. I’m not suggesting we improve the genetic stock of an entire race, just the least well off. This is a kind of eugenics that should appeal to liberals—progressive eugenics. […] In due course, why not conduct a trial in a city like Detroit and see if it works?”

Young cites work by Stephen Hsu, who would later join Young’s Academic Freedom Alliance, and Geoffrey Miller, an anti-trans evolutionary psychologist. Young also lists many key figures accused of scientific racism: “This is why so many on the Left feel a moral obligation to rubbish the work of hereditarians like Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Peter Saunders, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. From their quasi-religious viewpoint, any suggestion that important aspects of people’s personalities have a genetic basis is heresy.” The piece ends with a quote from Herrnstein and Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve, which promoted a link between “race” and “intelligence.”

In 2017, Young attended the London Conference on Intelligence, described as a secret eugenics conference that led to a university investigation. Later that year, Young spke at the conference for the International Society for Intelligence Research, which has been accused of laundering eugenic ideology into mainstream science.

2018 Office for Students appointment and resignation

In 2018, Young was appointed to the 15-member board of the Office for Students, which was responsible for enforcing “free speech” at schools in response to “hate speech” policies. The appointment led to public outcry over Young’s long history of questionable writing and posts on Twitter, 50,000 of which were deleted before Young resigned from the post days later.

Around the same time, Young stepped down from a role at the Fullbright Commission.

As with many anti-trans activists, this moment of public pushback sent Young spiraling into the world of anti-trans extremism.

Anti-trans activism (2019–)

In 2019, following the Office for Students debacle, Young published an anti-trans cover story for Standpoint. It takes a skeptical tone about several trans-supportive projects:

For the skeptical point of view in the “both side” piece, Young cites:

Young raises the specter of irreversible medical steps young people might later regret:

None of that would matter so much if the patients never had second thoughts about their gender identity, but some do. They are known as “de-transitioners” and are becoming an increasingly vocal lobby in the US. American journalist Jesse Singal interviewed several of them for a cover story in The Atlantic last year and was promptly rounded on by trans activists who accused him of exaggerating the scale of the problem.

Young then quotes from two trainees of Laura Edwards-Leeper mentioned by Singal:

I’ve tried to be even-handed in this article, but as you can probably tell I lean towards the sceptics. There are some thoughtful clinicians who, while endorsing the “affirmative care” approach in principle, believe it’s possible to be supportive of adolescents who present as trans without rubber-stamping their self-diagnosis. Jesse Singal encountered some of these in the course of reporting his piece for The Atlantic. “I would say ‘affirming’ isn’t always doing exactly what the kid says they want in the moment,” one told him. Another said: “Our role as clinicians isn’t to confirm or disconfirm someone’s gender identity — it’s to help them explore it with a little bit more nuance.”

Young’s online piece included a comment promoting the Pique Resilience Project, and Young’s piece was later republished alongside an anti-trans article by Stephanie Davies-Arai.

Free Speech Union (2019–)

In November 2019, Young co-founded the Free Speech Union, an organization with a disproportionate number of anti-trans extremists involved.

In a 2024 interview with Free Speech Union advisor Andrew Roberts for the Hoover Institution, Young said:

In the UK, we’ve seen a great pushback against trans rights activists. So the NHS has now finally announced it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers.

One of our gender identity clinics has just been shut down. We’re known now across the world as TERF island, because the TERF have largely been victorious in that particular battle. And that’s huge, because trans rights activists, along with their fellow social justice warriors, claim that they are on the right side of history.

That’s one of their most powerful arguments. That’s rhetoric which worked for communism for many decades, and it’s now worked for the woke cultists as well. But if they suffer a colossal setback, which they have, I think in this case, it begins to look as though they’re not on the right side of history, and their victory isn’t inevitable.

So at that point, the whole house of cards, I think, begins to crumble. But you can see it with the failure of woke in the entertainment industry, the failure of various Disney films, the attempt to create various trans and gay and female Marvel superhero characters. There’s no public appetite for any of this stuff.

References

Wright, Alison (June 29, 2024). Part 1. Toby Young’s disclosed interests and those undisclosed, by audience. Alison’s Newsletter https://alisonwright.substack.com/p/part-1-toby-youngs-disclosed-interests

“missfredawallace” (March 3, 2024). Fox and Young — Bad Actors 1. Medium https://medium.com/%40missfredawallace/fox-and-young-bad-actors-1-4b22c1430ac1

Fair, Alexandra (June 7, 2019). Situating Standpoint Magazine: Conservative Journalism and Eugenic Ideology. Black Perspectives https://www.aaihs.org/situating-standpoint-magazine-conservative-journalism-and-eugenic-ideology/

Lee, Stewart (January 14, 2018). How Toby Young got where he isn’t today. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/14/how-toby-young-got-where-he-isnt-today-universities-regulator-resignation

Wilkinson, Sophie (January 8, 2018). I – a Lesbian – Dressed Up as Toby Young to Get Into Gentlemen’s Clubs. VICE https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-a-lesbian-dressed-up-as-toby-young-to-get-into-gentlemans-clubs/

Keate, Georgie (January 6, 2018). ‘Porn addict’ Toby Young fights to keep role as student watchdog. The Times https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/porn-addict-toby-young-fights-to-keep-role-as-student-watchdog-p8tlktfv0

Butterworth, Benjamin (January 3, 2018). Labour calls for government to fire Toby Young over ‘misogyny and homophobia.’ PinkNews https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/01/03/labour-calls-for-government-to-fire-toby-young-over-misogyny-and-homophobia/

Duffy, Nick (January 2, 2018). Government’s new university regulator appointee called lesbians ‘hard-core dykes.’ PinkNews https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/01/02/governments-new-university-regulator-appointee-called-lesbians-hard-core-dykes/

Baynes, Chris (January 11, 2018). University College London launches ‘eugenics’ probe after controversial secret conference on campus. The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/university-college-london-eugenics-probe-secret-conference-campus-ucl-white-supremacists-debate-lci-a8153326.html

Staff report (September 26, 2013). Toby Young has edited his own Wikipedia page 200 times in six years. Political Scrapbook https://politicalscrapbook.net/2013/09/toby-young-has-edited-his-own-wikipedia-page-200-times-in-six-years/ [archive]

Staff report (January 15, 2002). Lord Young of Dartington. The Independent https://www.the-independent.com/news/obituaries/lord-young-of-dartington-9143358.html

Miller, Karl (June 15, 1993). Obituary: Sasha Young. The Independent https://www.the-independent.com/news/people/obituary-sasha-young-1493727.html

Anti-trans coverage

Stringer, Connor (January 12, 2024). Civil Service woke madness: Pronouns aren’t enough… you must THINK of trans colleagues as women now! Daily Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12957867/Civil-Service-woke-madness-Pronouns-arent-THINK-trans-colleagues-women-now.html

Morrison, Hamish (September 21, 2022). Toby Young PayPal accounts ban is ‘gender-critical discrimination’, says SNP’s Joanna Cherry. The National https://www.thenational.scot/news/22429623.toby-young-paypal-accounts-ban-gender-critical-discrimination-says-snps-joanna-cherry/

Selected writing by Young

Young, Toby (July 5, 2025). Ofcom still isn’t sure what a woman is. The Spectator https://spectator.com/article/ofcom-still-isnt-sure-what-a-woman-is/

Young, Toby (January 14, 2023). The trans rights conflict doesn’t add up. The Spectator https://spectator.com/article/the-trans-rights-conflict-doesnt-add-up/

Young, Toby (February 2020). The free speech crisis at Britain’s universities: The massive left-wing bias on campus is putting conservative students at risk. The Critic https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2020/the-free-speech-crisis-at-britains-universities/

Young, Toby (November 2019). Why are so many schoolchildren coming out as trans? in Young, Toby; Davies-Arai, Stephanie Transgender Children: A Discussion. Civitas https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/2399-B-Transgender-Children-WEB.pdf

  • originally published as print magazine cover story Boys Will Be Girls: Toby Young on the divisive trans debate. Standpoint 108 (February 2019).
  • online: The tricky business of gender identity. http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-february-2019-toby-young-tricky-business-gender-identity

Young, Toby (May 24, 2018). Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man? Quillette https://quillette.com/2018/05/24/cant-woman-like-man/

Young, Toby (January 3, 2018). In defence of Toby Young, by Toby Young. The Spectator https://spectator.com/article/in-defence-of-toby-young-by-toby-young/

Young, Toby (September 7, 2015). The Fall of the Meritocracy. Quadrant https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/ original url https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/ [archive]

Young, Toby (~1998). I Was a Lesbian for a Night. GQ text: http://www.nosacredcows.co.uk/golden_oldies/360/i_was_a_lesbian_for_a_night.html [archive]

Selected media

GBNews (October 10, 2023). Potential Labour government ‘a threat to gender critical free speech’ | Toby Young reacts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikgcPix-8pU

GBNews (February 16, 2023). ‘Shutting down debate!’ | Toby Young hits out at people dubbing JK Rowling ‘transphobic.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5HVGDIx5qA

GBNews (May 16, 2022). Do aggressive pro-trans activists setting back their own cause? | Toby Young gives his take. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIrPTIQFhk8

Spiked with Brendan O’Neill and Toby Young (January 20, 2022). Cancel culture and how to fight it, with Toby Young | The Brendan O’Neill Show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUJvUSZpk08

TalkTV (December 21, 2021). Toby Young: ‘Harry Miller was intimidated by police because of his gender critical views.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWV06nGPxwk

TalkTV (November 3, 2021). Toby Young: Professor Kathleen Stock resigns after trans row. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEg0toWiwIw

Plebity with Sasha White and Toby Young (December 27, 2020). Toby Young on Cancel Mobs and Free Speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9E-RIV8BFA

Quillette Podcast 130 (December 24, 2020). Toby Young on the Free Speech Union and His Campaign Against Cancel Culture.

Quillette Podcast (September 6, 2020). Conservative intellectual Douglas Murray talks to Toby Young about the newly emboldened hard left


Quillette Podcast (August 25, 2020). Yoram Hazony talks to Toby Young on the Marxist takeover of liberal institutions

Quillette Podcast (August 8, 2020). Rob Henderson talks to Toby Young about how cancel culture became one of America’s biggest exports

Quillette Podcast (July 4, 2020). Eric Kaufmann talks to Toby Young about America’s Maoist moment

Quillette Podcast (June 19, 2020). Joel Kotkin talks to Toby Young about the pandemic and its riotous aftermath

Quillette Podcast (May 19, 2020). John Lloyd talks to Toby Young about the geopolitical fall-out from the coronavirus crisis

Quillette Podcast with Jonathan Kay & Toby Young (April 30, 2020). Quillette editors Jonathan Kay and Toby Young talk about Jonathan’s article about coronavirus superspreaders —

Quillette Podcast (April 21, 2020). Dr Michael Shermer talks to Toby Young about his new book

Quillette Podcast (April 1, 2020). Professor Wilfred Reilly talks to Toby Young about his new book

Quillette Podcast (March 27, 2020). Matt Ridley talks to Toby Young about his new book

Quillette Podcast (March 14, 2020). Bo Winegard talks to Toby Young about losing his job

Quillette Podcast (February 9, 2020). Charles Murray talks to Toby Young about his new book

Quillette Podcast (January 20, 2020). George Orwell’s biographer Richard Bradford talks to Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (January 18, 2020). Conservative politician Daniel Hannan talks to Toby Young about Sir Roger Scruton

Quillette Podcast 38 (June 19, 2019). Jonah Goldberg & Aaron Sibarium with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast 40 (June 28, 2019). Michael Shellenberger with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (June 7, 2019). Eric Kaufmann & Sunder Katwala with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (August 14, 2019). Professor Bruce Gilley on Anti-Conservative Bias with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (July 15, 2019). Professor Wilfred Reilly on Hate Crime Hoaxes with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (September 4, 2019). Carl Gardner on Britain’s constitutional crisis with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (November 7, 2019). Steve Richards on the UK election with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (December 27, 2018). Jonathan Church on “white privilege” with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (February 14, 2019). Professor Matthew Goodwin on Brexit & Trump with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (March 13, 2019). Stand-up comedian Andrew Doyle with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (January 11, 2019). Professor Jeff McMahan on Journal of Controversial Ideas with Toby Young

Quillette Podcast (November 28, 2018). Eric Kaufmann & Ben Cobley on identity politics with Toby Young
Podcast Republic

Quillette Podcast 1 (November 6, 2018). Jordan Peterson talks to Toby Young about free speech & “The Coddling of the American Mind”

TRIGGERnometry with Konstantin Kisin, Francis Foster, and Toby Young (August 19, 2018). Toby Young on Journalism, Education, Public Shaming and Offence Archeology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDDr4EG3SIc

Toby Young (November 14, 2017). Defending Free Speech at the Battle for Ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4-UJoKVdjk

Resources

Toby Young (nosacredcows.co.uk) [archive]

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)

UK Parliament (parliament.uk)

IMDb (imdb.com)

The Spectator (spectator.com)

Quillette (quillette.com)

The Daily Sceptic (dailysceptic.org)

  • Toby Young
  • dailysceptic.org/author/toby-young
  • original url lockdownsceptics.org [archive]

The Telegraph (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/)

  • Toby Young
  • telegraph.co.uk/authors/t/tk-to/toby-young
  • Toby Young’s blog
  • blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung [archive]

The Critic (thecritic.co.uk)

Standpoint (standpointmag.co.uk) [archive]

  • Toby Young
  • standpointmag.co.uk/writers/?showid=Toby%20Young [archive]

X/Twitter (x.com)

YouTube (youtube.com)

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)