The Silencing Of The Gender Lambs

A review of 'Sacrificial Lambs: A Liberal Reporter Exposes How the Progressive Left Harms Children in the Name of Gender Ideology' by Anita Bartholomew

A theme is emerging. As the decade of ideological transgenderism dissolves, books on the topic now consistently resemble horror fiction on the subject of ‘trans kids’. Parent stories about clinics, schools, and whole communities ‘affirming’ their children on the flimsiest of ‘identity’ pronouncements have too much in common with films like Wicker Man, or Rosemary’s Baby, or Village of the Damned to ignore the commonalities.

When I started writing about these topics after 2017, I put a framed 8x10” publicity still image from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, autographed by Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy, next to my screen. I kept it within eyesight until moving to California this year, glancing at it a few times every day whenever I was reminded that we all currently live in an upside-down world of genderwoo. I cannot speak to Anita Bartholomew’s writing method, but she clearly understood the assignment. Available for pre-order.

A journalist, Bartholomew wrote this book because she got curious about what was happening to the children of her peer group. Upon investigation, she was alarmed to discover a pervasive, unscientific ideology harming children. “This is authoritarian. It’s tyrannical. It’s cult-like”, she writes. “Public fetishism, under a pastel rainbow banner, is re-making our society.” The children are the sacrificial lambs of her title. In that sense it is closer to a true crime book than a horror novel, since its topic is horrifyingly real.

Curiosity led to shocking discoveries. By her own account, Ms. Bartholomew’s politics began to the left of Bernie Sanders, yet in her subtitle she indicts “the Progressive Left” for harming children with genderwoo. “Racial and gender identity were being treated as intertwined social justice issues. This wasn’t the social justice movement of my youth, of crusading for peace and for the rights of the downtrodden.” It is instead a sinister cult belief, propagated by disturbing people, that inscribes adult desires on the bodies of children.

“Researchers made a series of honest mistakes” when they started blocking puberty in children, Bartholomew writes. “But they also made reckless assumptions. And they ignored earlier research that contradicted what they wanted to believe was true.” Psychosocial outcomes of medical transition in adult men were so bad that clinicians tried to start earlier, so the results would look better, satisfy the future adult person more, lead to better outcomes.

Grievous mistakes became clear with time, but not until the belief had set in, thanks to endless disinformation that was never corrected. “After the worst of the research errors were discovered, the headlines should have screamed ‘Stop everything!’ And everything should have stopped”, Bartholomew says. It is the lamentation of the liberal who sees, at last, what their corporate media filtering mechanisms had heretofore concealed from them. They hear the screaming of the gender lambs at last.

For the experienced TERF, Ms. Bartholomew touches on all the bases. “Women prisoners are being harassed, beaten, and raped by men who, by simply claiming to identify as female, are being locked into cells with them”, she writes. She interviews “Becca”, a transwidow who reports her now ex-husband has tried to resemble her through plastic surgery, as if he wants to walk in her skin like a monster out of myth. Sports and locker rooms and school restrooms become scenes of contested ‘identity’ in which the boundaries have been blurred and enforcement of boundaries punished.

For “in an age partly governed by rules laid down by mass psychogenic madness, nobody knows what the rules are any more. Those who dare to challenge even wildly inappropriate behavior could easily find themselves punished for objecting.” Blasphemy rules discourage complaints. Wherever the rights of any protected class — women, children, faith minorities — clash with the supposed civil rights of the imaginary genderbeing inside someone, the magical, mystical, invisible, ineffable genderthing wins. This is ‘trans rights’ in praxis, meaning application as a revolutionary philosophy intended to transform society. All your civil rights are belong to trans now.

Ms. Bartholomew treads on ground that is contested among critics of genderwoo. “If a person truly has gender dysmorphic disorder, the last thing they want is for someone to see their genitalia,” a psychotherapist tells her. Quote, print, controversy. Truly is a problematic word, for no one is truly ‘born in the wrong body’. One might then argue, responsively, that even though there is no actual such thing as a person born in the wrong body, there is a diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ in the DSM-V, but even this is problematic, since genderwoo activists wrote the definition.

Only after this doctrinal disputation can anyone in the ‘gender critical’ X space finally agree that what Ms. Bartholomew says here is true. Mr. Richard Cox, the Tier III sex offender who was living his naked dream in northern Virginia locker rooms and restrooms until he was arrested and put on trial due to community outrage, does not meet the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. He has absolutely nothing in common with any ‘trans child’. He is an adult male who exploited the gender identity confusion that was deliberately created in law and policy to make way for the supposed ‘trans child’ that needs opposite-sex places to pee.

Stop arguing about this point, and the entire transgender ‘inclusion’ project implodes. One boy allowed on the team means that he is the only player using the female locker room to change. “Rather than disrobe in front of their bearded teammate, all the girls changed in their cars”, Ms. Bartholomew writes of one infamous case. The boy should not want his penis to be seen by girls, or anyone at all, if he is actually suffering clinical dysphoria, whatever that is. He is not ‘transgender’ even according to the supposed ‘science’. His ‘identity’ has zero basis in diagnosis.

Such episodes are far more common than advocates of ‘trans inclusion’ want us to believe, which is why the gender lambs have consistently been silenced. The recounting here of events in Loudoun County in 2021, when a 14 year-old boy was allowed to rape two female students as a direct result of an ‘inclusion’ policy that was already being enforced ahead of enactment, is the most complete and detailed I have seen in one place, and the closest the book comes to a true crime version of the transgender policy craze making life hell for parents and students.

Regular readers of The Distance know that the Trump administration is quite serious about prosecuting gender medicine as fraud, particularly in children. Like most people who learn enough about this topic, Ms. Bartholomew is in favor of criminal prosecutions for the perpetrators. That outcome would surely guarantee the true crime framework will be used to explain the pediatric gender medicine fad and its iatrogenic harms in future literature.

Gender ideology has no place in a curriculum for minors that is intended to educate them for the real world. Instead, it “serves only one purpose: to indoctrinate children into a belief system.” This is not sexual education, nor is it designed to help homosexuals accept themselves. “Under the guise of sex ed, children are being taught to memorize, recite, and believe the gender ideology liturgy.”

Ms. Bartholomew brings receipts to the reader’s attention throughout the book. “Remarkably little of the so-called National Sex Education Standards document is actually sex ed. It’s closer to brainwashing,” she writes. “Most of it force-feeds kids ‘queer’ concepts of gender … it often begins in the earliest grades.”

In yet another turn that is bound to be problematic for some, Ms. Bartholomew notes that women seem to do the most prostletyzing. She notes the phenomenon of the “cheerleader” in parent accounts: an affirming female in a young man’s peer group who influences his transgender identification. She writes of Barbara Farmer, a school employee who tried to groom an immigrant child into running away from her family to join a ‘glitter family’.

Maia [Chatterjee] told her mom everything. The main reason Maia was calling herself “Felix” was to please the teacher who had showered so much attention on her. But she didn’t want to be a boy any longer. Still, she was worried that if she stopped: “The teacher is going to be so mad at me and she’s not going to like me.”

The book checks in with experts. David Habib Martin, LPC reads What Are Your Words: A Book About Pronouns, one of the childrens’ books at issue in the recent Mahmoud v. Taylor decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Martin finds that “indoctrination was quite obviously a ‘shameless and aggressive’ goal of the text”, which was designed to disorient undeveloped minds. “This is the mechanism by which religions and ideology work on the implicit memory and cognitive foundation of children.”

Rather than an invisible deity, the genderwoo indoctrination encourages ideation and rumination about the self. This faith-conversion begins with social transition, the first step in lifelong medicalization. For despite their obvious limits as low-quality evidence, “the studies agreed on one point: the kids who socially transitioned at a young age continued to claim a cross-sex identity as they grew up.”

So-called social transition is not a neutral act, but “a powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that will substantially reduce the number of children ‘desisting’ from transgender identity,” according to psychologist Stephen Levine “in an affidavit for a Wisconsin lawsuit against a school that encouraged children to hide newly adopted ‘identities’ from parents.” Keeping secrets from parents is presented as ‘safety’ because what father or mother would not be upset by a harmful cult recruiting their child at school, in secret?

It “should have been obvious” to everyone that “what set apart the children who stayed on the ‘trans’ path was not the magical gender identity of the kids. It was the acquiescence of the grown-ups in their lives.” The adults around the child “went along with the fantasy that these children were a different sex.” Through CPS, family courts, and other administrative means, the cult of the ‘trans child’ could enforce pronoun participation upon the unwilling adults in their lives. Parents who cooperate will still discover their child is being told to leave their family and join the new glitter family, anyway.

Erin Friday found a secret identity on her daughter’s phone. “Emancipate. Run away, these new online ‘friends’ insisted. They warned that if her parents discovered her online exchanges, they could take her phone; if they did, that was child abuse.” She was distressed to find a rabbit hole of grooming. “Strange men had been reaching out, attempting to seduce her daughter. It was terrifying.”

“Once these kids say that they’re trans online, it’s like a beacon, a calling card for pedophiles,” says Friday. “I got into her phone and I saw the messages and the amount of porn that was sent to her from older people. The telephone numbers, I called them. I looked up their accounts. They were grown men.”

“Older girls on social media coaxed the younger ones to sell seminude pictures of themselves to these pedophiles” in the online worlds Ms. Friday found. Then the book tells the awful story of Sage Blair, a minor girl whose transgender identification led a court to keep her apart from her parents. Sage had been raped, was abused in state custody in a male juvenile facility, and escaped it only to wind up in the hands of a sex trafficker.

Most of the stories in this volume were familiar to me, and will be familiar to the reader who is already neck-deep in the criticism of gender ideology. Beth Bourne, someone I personally know and interviewed, is in this book. The book touches all the bases, but it is focused on the children, the lambs being sacrificed.

Ms. Bartholomew debunks the 2014 survey by the Williams Institute at UCLA which has been used to spread the myth of ‘trans kids’ being vulnerable to suicide. She writes about the studies in Finland that led to the closure of the pediatric gender clinic, the scandal at Tavistok.

She writes about autogynephilia and transvestic fetishism among the 80 percent of adult males who ‘identify’ as transgender. Ms. Bartholomew recalls the studies in a previous generation which found the rate of sex offenders was as much as four times higher among transgender-identified men in prison. The myth of the ‘trans child’ was important to these grown men for the worst possible reasons. They are the mysterious ‘plus’ at the end of the alphabetical contrivance LGBTQ+. It took a kind of magical thinking to believe such men did not exist.

Magical thinking is everywhere in transgenderism, though. “No doubt, men with transvestic fetishism consider the garments they wear to have something akin to magic, especially those who can’t achieve orgasm without them.” For a man to claim that he feels unsuited to his flesh might inspire empathy. Explaining that his femaleness is derived from his male masturbatory satisfaction, on the other hand, is unlikely to elicit the same empathy for that man.

How did this happen? Anita Bartholomew looks at the impressive funding that transgender issues have enjoyed for a decade, but concludes “you can’t explain this phenomenon simply by counting up the cash.” Instead, she describes “a grotesquely idiosyncratic coalition” or “web of unlikely allies” to acknowledge a far wider problem than money can explain on its own. Put simply, the belief in ‘trans kids’ has been very powerful in the minds of many different kinds of people.

[T]he wealthy transvestic fetishists and autogynephiles; the indoctrinated educators; the established non-profits seeking new sources of revenue; the moms and dads who’ve “affirmed” their children and desperately need for it to have been the right call; the medical and mental health professionals providing trans-related services; the kids who’ve been purposely confused by their elders; the gays and lesbians who see the T as part of their tribe; the college-educated social justice warriors; all the other “sexual minorities” (AKA perverts) demanding understanding and acceptance; the legacy media that report trans insanity as if it were Truth itself; and the army of virtue signalers whose interest is almost entirely based on a narcissistic desire for high-fives and attaboys.

Per the title, Sacrificial Lambs: A Liberal Reporter Exposes How the Progressive Left Harms Children in the Name of Gender Ideology is intended to change minds. Pitchstone Publishing has become the leading American publisher of books criticizing gender ideology and this is a fine addition to their catalog. I do not know that it will change minds in the present, but I suspect that historians will be interested in primary sources on the current moment of political realignment, as ‘the left’ realized it was host to a cult that harms children.