My name is Nick Wallis. I am a freelance journalist. I am probably best known for my work on the Post Office scandal in the UK, though I have a small profile in the US through my work reporting Depp v Heard.
Now the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry has come to a close, I am planning to do some writing (and broadcasting, if anyone will let me) on the gender wars. I’ve been following the subject on social media for a while, occasionally commenting on twitter.
I realise there are many well-established journalists and activists doing superb work in this area. I’m hoping I can add to it.
My interest in this subject
My initial interest probably started in around 2020, though that was a year when I was completely tied up in Post Office and Depp things, so it may have been later. Initially I thought the gender wars would be confined to factions on the progressive left, but the speed at which the ideology captured our institutions left me somewhat bewildered.
What concerned me most at the time was the shutting down of free speech. I did not understand how or why anyone who refused to toe the trans activist line should be no-platformed or, as the denunciations intensified, hounded out of their jobs. It seemed crazy to me that in a liberal democracy, new ideas should be scaffolded in taboo.
I also found the central arguments of gender ideology unpersuasive. Men can believe they become women just by thinking it (and vice versa), but I didn’t see why I should agree, or be compelled to support anyone who does.
Peaking
Gender critical (or as I prefer, sex realist) types often talk about “peaking” – the moment at which you realise that gender ideology has the potential for – or is – causing harm. My moment came when I heard someone use the phrase “completely reversible” in the context of drugs which can block puberty in children. It struck me that any drug powerful enough to stop puberty cannot be reversed without a time-machine.
Yet it seemed this phrase – “completely reversible” – was being used freely and without too much in the way of challenge. I read into the concepts around social transitioning, changing pronouns, misgendering, deadnaming, hormone treatments, double-mastectomies, phalloplasties and vaginoplasties. Surgical intervention appeared to be celebrated as a Good Thing for Young People rather than the mutilation of healthy flesh to assuage mental distress. I read about the rise in trans propaganda on the internet, in schools and in our healthcare systems. I became concerned about the state’s role through the education system and social services which encouraged children to cut themselves off from their parents if they raised objections to their child’s choices. The first three books I read on the subject were Helen Joyce’s Trans, Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think and Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. All are highly recommended.
I have a personal interest in this subject. In the eighties, I was a gender nonconforming teenager. I dread to think about the paths I could have been led down if I was growing up now. When I was younger, I pursued an interest in gender into tertiary educaction. As an undergraduate I studied literary theory and did my (no doubt terrible) dissertation on cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was on our syllabus. Literary theory was a close sibling of critical/queer/gender theory which, in the early nineties, was just taking off. It was intellectually exhilarating, but even then I remember thinking the gender elements of it would have difficulty gaining traction outside academia. After all, the concepts of “man” and “woman” were pretty well-established and backed up by the undeniable reality of biology. But I was exposed to fascinating and liberating ideas and got a great deal out of it. Then I left it alone for the best part of three decades.
A matter of conscience
In the 2020s, as my work on the Post Office scandal reached a wider audience, people began to get in touch, asking if I would look into the trans movement and the effect it was having on women, their personal spaces and sport. I wanted to help but a) I am a coward b) as a broadcast journalist I held that my default public position on any controversial topic should be objective and neutral c) I had a lot on my plate writing books about the Post Office and Depp v Heard.
Last year I decided I should stop being a coward and do something. I was becoming convinced that real harms were being done to principled people and, unforgivably, children. It was against my conscience to keep silent. I approached my publisher to see if they would let me follow up Depp v Heard with a book about gender. After some thought, they agreed. Then, at the beginning of this year, the Post Office story blew up, thanks to the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Having pursued that story for more than a decade, I felt it was important to continue talking and writing about it to a new and wider audience.
So here we are
It’s late 2024. The gender wars are boiling over. Sex realists (in the UK, at least) have gathered powerful allies (Rowling) and won important battles (Forstater, Cass, the demise of Nicola Sturgeon). As I write, a group called For Women Scotland are taking the Scottish Government to the UK Supreme Court so our judges can decide what the definition of a woman is – or at least what the law means when it refers to women. It’s a big moment. Let’s see what happens next.