Blinded by the Rainbow
How queer theory leads directly to a lack of understanding of appropriate safeguarding, in public and private spaces.
David Paisley is a Scottish actor who starred in River City. He also attempted (unsuccessfully) to sue me for libel for, amongst other things, calling him a paedophile enabler. I took the view that his rhetoric was paedophile enabling, whether he intended it or not, and set out my defence based on his own words. On the basis of this, he withdrew his case.
I am sharing that document in sections (lightly edited). Paisley himself is not of any interest or importance to me, but his tweets, intentionally or not, are instructive regarding wider positions in the debate. They demonstrate clearly the ways in which queer theory is incompatible with safeguarding. You will find arguments like those Paisley makes repeated throughout the debate.
It is not just that a few people on the trans rights side of the debate have made safeguarding errors. It is that queer theory is a tool designed to break down boundaries, whereas safeguarding is a series of tools designed to hold them up. Queer theory and safeguarding are utterly incompatible; the destruction of safeguarding boundaries around children is baked into the queer theory cake. I am sharing this document because I believe that an understanding of these issues will help embolden and empower women to protect children.
Many thanks to my friend, Hen, for her early comments on this. Any remaining bloopers are mine. You can hear Hen’s speech being read out here. She’s quite a lot of woman for one woman.
“When did we get so weird about the idea of seeing another human?”
Many disability activists campaign for the right for women and girls to demand and receive “same sex care.” Disabled people, especially those with severe disabilities - whether that be physical, learning, cognitive or a mixture, are particularly vulnerable to predatory attacks.[2]
In the 3 years ending March 2018, 3.7% of disabled adults experienced sexual assault, compared with 1.9% of able-bodied adults. Disabled women were almost twice as likely to have experienced sexual assault in the last year.[3] Disabled children are three times more likely than able bodied children to experience sexual abuse.[4]
The Care Quality Commission report found in 2020 that women receiving care (elderly and disabled women) were three times more likely to be victims of assault than men and men are four times more likely than women to be the perpetrators. [5] Same sex care will not alleviate all the problems outlined above. However, it will go a long way towards mitigating them.
Sexual assault and rape of disabled women, whether it be by a carer, family member or stranger, has a daily impact on a disabled woman’s life. A disabled woman who is a survivor of sexual abuse has to give over 100% trust to her carer to carry out intimate care that is undignified by nature - for example, bowel management and washing intimate areas of her body. Twice daily intimate care is a reminder of her trauma but she has to deal with it, she has no choice.
Disabled adults and children who need intimate care cannot step away from it to allow themselves to ‘heal’. An abused disabled woman or child today will need intimate care tonight and, in the morning, every day, for the rest of their life.
Paisley tweeted the following. It was a tweet apparently about the Staniland question, but it also blurs boundaries for disabled women and girls who need personal care.
“My mum had seven sons. In what world do you imagine a single mum with multiple boys hasn’t seen us all pee? She literally toilet trained us. When I was a child we used to share a bath, sometimes with a brother, sometimes with my mum. Years later I helped my mum bathe and go to the toilet when she was sick with cancer and on chemo. Bodies are just bodies, when did we get so weird about the idea of seeing another human.”
The claim about caring for his mother is an easy one for Paisley to make. It is unhelpful and speaks over disabled women who ask for same sex care. Many men have given personal care to their ill and elderly female relatives. I know some of them. Not one would dream of raising the care they gave as Paisley has done, as a point in public debate.
A reasonable person could conclude that Paisley’s tweet is using his mother’s illness to imply that disabled women who want same sex care are “weird” because “bodies are just bodies.” A reasonable person could conclude that Paisley’s tweet implies that, based on his experience, men providing personal care for non-consenting women as a matter of course is acceptable. A reasonable person could conclude that any woman withholding her consent is, in Paisley’s view, “weird.”
The safeguarding of vulnerable adults and children should never be compromised by a boundary blurring ideology. The rights of a disabled woman or girl to same sex care should never be overridden by the right of a male to be recognised as female.
It’s difficult to see how Paisley’s implication could be anything other than a justification for non-consensual, mixed sex personal care. These tweets enable predators not just by blurring important boundaries between public/private, adults/children, personal/professional, boundaries that are in place to protect women and girls, but they do so by drawing false equivalences, and pretending that these boundaries do not exist.
Predators want two things; access and cover. Access to victims which they can abuse, and cover for their crimes if they are caught. They want everybody to look the other way so they can get on with what they want to do. It should not be news to anybody that predatory men will do anything in service of these goals. They will become sports coaches, teachers, doctors. They will run marathons, become TV personalities. They will have children with the intent of using those children as bargaining chips with other men like them when they reach an age. It is of no surprise to me that so many of them are using the self ID/trans loophole.
It cannot be concluded from Paisley’s tweet that he is a predator. There are many reasons to make statements like this. He may lack of knowledge, understanding or experience of appropriate safeguarding or the risks to disabled women and children posed by self ID. He may have boundary difficulties in the wake of abuse or grooming. He may simply have read too much queer theory. There are any number of reasons to spout this view.
This becomes ever more obvious when the further implications of his tweet are considered.
“Sharing a bath”
Paisley stated in his tweets that his mother had “seen us all pee.” “Us all” refers to him and his brothers. He also says that he shared a bath, “sometimes with a brother, sometimes with my mum.”
“My mum had seven sons. In what world do you imagine a single mum with multiple boys hasn’t seen us all pee? She literally toilet trained us. When I was a child we used to share a bath, sometimes with a brother, sometimes with my mum. Years later I helped my mum bathe and go to the toilet when she was sick with cancer and on chemo. Bodies are just bodies, when did we get so weird about the idea of seeing another human.”
I have been in the room many times whilst my boys peed, when they were young. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever really “seen” them pee. The language is, to use Paisley’s word, “weird.” Setting that aside, many mothers share baths with their children. Earliest memories of children start around four years old. Almost all parents stop sharing a bath with their children by the time they are one, or maybe two years old at the outside. Therefore, most children do not remember sharing a bath with their mother.
Even if there are many grown men who do remember sharing a bath with their mother, talking about it in a debate on a public forum is quite strange. Paisley is a public figure, as was his mother, which makes this claim even weirder. Paisley has taken an intensely private experience between him and his mother and put it on twitter. That is his prerogative – but his words, intentionally or not, blur the boundaries between public and private. Making this point in the context of the Staniland question[1] debate is a “red flag” (a matter of grave concern) to those who are astute to the maintenance of safeguarding boundaries.
Paisley implies that because he shared a bath with his mother, women and girls shouldn’t be “weird” about seeing the genitals of an unrelated, adult male in a public changing room. However, these two situations are nothing alike. One is private, between a mother and a child, a loving, intimate experience, primarily in the child’s interest, with no sexual element at all. The other is public, between an adult male stranger and a girl child. It is sexual for the adult male and frightening, even traumatising for the child. It is entirely in the interest of the adult male and is defined by his sexual urges. There is no equivalence whatsoever between the a mother having a bath with her child, and an adult male exposing himself to a girl he does not know. To make such a comparison is a safeguarding “red flag” or matter of grave concern.
The language is telling. A nine-year-old female victim of male flashing who was exposed to the genitals of an adult male in a female changing room is framed, by this tweet, as simply “seeing another human.” Any objection she might have is pathologized by the term “weird.” A thought experiment; what would happen to a male in a men’s changing room if he went up to a group of four men and an nine year old boy and exposed his penis to them, purposefully? The very best he could hope for is to be swiftly and firmly ejected from the premises. But somehow, “I’m trans” was an acceptable excuse for a predatory male to do this to women and girls at the Wii Spa.
Even if there were no attempt to extrapolate from him having a bath with his mother to other situations, Paisley’s tweet disregards almost all the important facts about the child, the parent and their relationship that could impact on safeguarding and boundaries. It utterly ignores the fact that safeguarding is not a blanket thing that you can throw over interactions between adults and children and then they’re safe. It is a complicated, difficult set of decisions that must be taken in every interaction between adults and children, always with the child’s best interest in mind. It matters what sex the adults and children are, the nature and extent of the existing relationship between the adult and the child matters, as does how closely they are related. A bath with a one year old is very different from a bath with a ten year old. A disabled child may need additional help at older ages and stages. Fathers looking after children will have to think carefully how to manage situations like taking them swimming.
Paisley’s tweet ignores all of this. Instead, he tweeted out that women and children are “weird” for not wanting to be the victims of sexual offences?[2]. This does not imply that Paisley is a paedophile. He may not understand the safeguarding implications of what he is saying. He may lack boundaries. He may have been groomed himself. He may lack experience of making safeguarding decisions. He may just be so far down the queer theory rabbit hole that he is blinded by glitter dust and rainbows to the very real dangers faced by women and girls. There are many other reasons to make statements like this and I do not know which one applies to Paisley. However, whatever the intention/motivation, it is my opinion that the tweet blurs safeguarding boundaries and enables paedophiles, that it normalises sex offenders showing their genitals to children, and that this directly enables those who would commit sex offences against women and girls.
I do not believe it is libel to say so.
[1] The date of the tweet is known to Paisley but not to me – it may be that this was also in the context of the Wii Spa Incident, but may have been before it. Either way, the Wii Spa Incident is simply a real world illustration of the Staniland Question, so it is immaterial.
[2] Note: the Wii Spa incident turned out to have no convincing history or evidence of any attempt to transition. He was a male with a history of sexual offences. Many such incidents have been recorded.
[1] On reading this question, a reasonable person might respond with “when did we get so unweird about seeing other people’s genitals.” The desire to “cover your modesty” is a fairly universal human experience. Children of age three will run about naked after a bath unthinkingly. A week later, they want to cover up. This is normal childhood development. To suggest that nudity is “normal” and that being frightened by the naked male genitalia of a stranger is “weird” is directly paedophile enabling.
[2] The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse | IICSA Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
[3] The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse | IICSA Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
[4] The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse | IICSA Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
I've thought about this often. I'm sure when you wrote this, you had Hen's experience in mind, among other women's.
For anyone who doesn't know, Henrietta Freeman is a quadriplegic women with some cognitive impairments, including memory problems. She campaigns for same-sex care for disabled women and is completely brilliant. I won't post her Twitter handle here, but everyone should totally follow her.
Here's another friend of mine reading a speech Hen wrote at the Let Women Speak event in Glasgow recently:
https://youtu.be/qloik3Oz2cM?t=1530
Whenever Hen writes about this stuff, the abuse she gets from trans activists is *absolutely horrific*.
They are completely incensed by the idea that an extremely vulnerable woman might want to insist on same-sex intimate care. Hen's memory issues mean that if she were abused by a carer, she might not remember it until it was far too late to gather any physical evidence. This 'carer' would be a male stranger who has access to her home when she's alone. And, even worse, it would be very easy for him to get access to her key outside the appointment times or to make a copy of that key. It would be very easy for him to trade it with other abusers. Whatever professional expertise I have is in security and the security community knows that this sort of thing absolutely happens. It's an extremely low hurdle for abusers.
This is a terrifying situation and yet a large number of trans activists just can not stand the idea of her having sing;e-sex care, to the extent that they send her some of the worst abuse I've ever seen in an attempt to silence her.
This is queer theory in action. This is a direct result of the attempted erasure of boundaries. No boundary can be tolerated and even brilliant, brave, iron-strong women like Hen suffer greatly for it. Hen literally doesn't have a voice, but she has ways of making herself heard. There are countless women, children and older people who do not.
It appears that the end game of some of the most vocal activists (certainly not all trans people) truly is to remove women from public life. If you don’t want to be in a locker room where a “woman” is walking around naked looking at women with an exposed penis, a “woman” who could easily overpower the average woman and sexually assault her, then women will stop going to the gym. If you don’t want to be in a public restroom where you are alone with a person who might assault you, you start staying home, or at least stop taking your daughters out. If you feel it’s inappropriate to have to explain to your kindergartner daughter what an erection is and why a man might have one and why that may be dangerous to her but she can’t say that it’s dangerous because then she’ll be called transphobic, you just start not going out. If playing sports is dangerous and demoralizing because many of the participants have an overwhelming advantage due to height, muscularity, and hip structure, women will stop playing. Public life will start to consist of 2 categories of people, men and “women”, and they’ll call it equality and progress while actual people with female bodies are no longer able to participate.