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 active interest in the current nuttiness probably started in around 2022, though that was a year when I was completely tied up in Post Office and Depp things, so I didn’t do much except read. I had a vague awareness of what was going on pre-pandemic, but I must admit back then I thought the gender wars would be confined to factions on the progressive left. The speed at which gender ideology (scaffolded in the #nodebate taboo) captured our institutions was breathtaking.
What concerned me most initially was the shutting down of free speech. I did not understand how or why anyone who refused to toe a trans activist line should be no-platformed or, as the denunciations intensified, hounded out of their jobs. On doing the reading, I 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 humour 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 the “completely reversible” phrase was being used freely and without too much in the way of challenge. I read further 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 (though as one detransitioner told me, I would be very unlikely to do more than consider transition in passing as I have precisely none of the usual susceptibilities, so I need to be careful about retrospectively creating a narrative to fit a political position, which is a good point).
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 reading list. It was that kind of course. Literary theory is a close sibling of critical/queer/gender theory which, in the early nineties, was just taking off. Learning about this stuff 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, when it came to biology, defined by certain immutable characteristics. 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. They were often fearful of losing their jobs or friends, or in the worst cases, their children. I wanted to help but I was busy, I am a coward and, as a broadcast journalist, I held that my default public position on any controversial topic should be objective and neutral.
In 2023, I decided I should stop being a coward and do something. Principled people were being maligned and children appeared to have been damaged in pursuit of some kind of idelogical ideal. The sort of thing people shouldn’t be propagating, let alone falling for, was mainstream doctrine in the liberal west. The more I read into this the more I am becoming convinced this is a huge story, or, as the Swedish psychiatrist Dr Sven Román suggested: “one of the biggest medical scandals in history… the abusing of children”.
I approached my publisher to see if they would let me follow up Depp v Heard: the unreal story with a book about gender. After some thought, they agreed. Then, at the beginning of 2024, the Post Office scandal 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 2025. The gender wars are boiling over. Sex realists in the UK have found some powerful allies (JK Rowling, Kemi Badenoch, Wes Streeting) and won important battles (Bell, 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. Let’s see what happens next.