Knowledge is Power

Sarah Phillimore's Reflections on the Bigger Picture Conference

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I was delighted to be invited to speak at the Genspect Bigger Picture conference, held in Lisbon on 27-30 September 2024, but hadn’t factored in just how exhausting it would be. We had a packed programme for the three days and I wasn’t able to identify any speaker or topic I felt I could miss.

The allure and rapid spread of gender identity ideology, across even those professions you would have thought would be immune, such as medicine and the law, has been so complete, and the consequences for challenge so vicious and serious, that unpacking it is very difficult. Even after six years of what seems like intense study, meetings like this only highlight how much I have yet to learn or have only imperfectly understood. It is essential to understand the intersection of medicine, law, and therapy and then see how this has impacted on children and parents and the very structure of society itself. It’s a gruelling process and I think only made possible by taking advantages of such meetings and the expertise on offer.

I found every presentation to be of value, and everyone was able to tell me something that I didn’t know, or hadn’t been able to articulate fully. Dr Stephen Levine explained the value of the parents’ perspectives as often the only ones able to see the whole trajectory of their children’s possible lives, and yet too often dismissed as ‘transphobic’ for not being immediately on board with their child’s transition. Rosie Kay spoke about ‘transhumanism’ and the drive to create ‘super soldiers’ by way of genetic modification. The parallels with gender identity are clear, both take away the ability to appreciate the human experience and create ‘thwarted humans’. There was wide resonance at the conference and beyond with Helen Joyce’s comment ‘if we can’t say what a man or a woman is, how can we say what health or disease is?’ The comment that lingered longest for me was that of Matthias Desmet, a clinical psychologist who asked how entire societies buy into absurd narratives. The psychological dynamic of the totalitarian state is very different to that of the classic dictatorship, which rules by fear. In the totalitarian state, a portion of the population is in the grip of dedication to false information, to the extent that they will denounce friends and family and feel proud to do so.

So when people ask me – why do you care? Why do you bother? It’s only a small group of people who want to ‘transition’, just let them live their lives! – this is why. Because gender identity ideology goes far beyond the body of the individual who wishes to present to the outside world in this way or that way, or the mental health of the distressed child who has been falsely assured that medical or surgical transition is the answer to all their worries.

This has become a battleground for our very reality; the thoughts we are allowed to think and the words we are allowed to speak.

I was going to deliver a fairly dry presentation about how the child protection legal system in England and Wales had lost its way for a bit but now seemed to be back on track, and that was great. However, I was inspired by the rage and fury of Bev Jackson from the LGB Alliance about what gender identity ideology had done to homosexuals. I took a harder line in my presentation. The law and medicine of all the professions, should never have fallen as hard and as fast as they did for an ideology that has no legal or evidential basis. It should be a matter of shame and fury to us all.

To unravel the harm done by gender identity is going to be a long hard slog, requiring the ability to think outside one’s own narrow specialism and understand the intersections and the impacts. It will be impossible for any of us to do this alone. Events such as the Bigger Picture conference are an essential part of the fightback. Knowledge is power.

Sarah Phillimore is a barrister with over 20 years of experience in child protection law and runs the Child Protection Resource website. She is also a campaigner for women’s and children’s rights, advocating for the importance of biological sex and freedom of speech.

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