Unsilenced Project

In this latest Unsilenced Project story, Stephanie (a teacher and mother from the South East) shares the story of her autistic daughter, who announced she was trans at the age of 14. What began as a sudden declaration quickly revealed the combined influences of school peers, PSHE materials, Instagram and social affirmation.
Stephanie describes her initial horror and gut rejection of the idea, the strain it placed on her marriage and her relationship with her son, and the desperate search for ethical therapy. She recounts editing harmful lessons in her own classroom, challenging materials sent to her son’s school, and later connecting with Bayswater and James Esses’ Just Therapy list. Her daughter, now nearly 20, is self-funding testosterone.
Stephanie’s account is raw, protective and clear-eyed: a mother who trusted her instincts, researched extensively, and continues to plant seeds of doubt while looking after her own mental health. It is a stark illustration of how gender ideology can isolate families and why parents must be free to support their children without fear of being treated as the problem.
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Steph, a newly graduated junior doctor who trained in Scotland, shares how she encountered gender ideology during medical school and why she believes biological sex must remain central to safe medical practice.
She describes the early impact of COVID restrictions on her training and social life, then how the topic of gender entered her world through university friendships. A series of debates with a close nursing-student friend ended their friendship after she stated her view that humans are male or female, that disorders of sexual development do not create a third sex, and that single-sex spaces matter for women’s safety and for accurate clinical care. She recounts being told the disagreement was a potential fitness-to-practise issue and receiving threats that she would be reported to the school.
Steph notes that many doctors, GPs, and staff privately shared her concerns about evidence, patient safety, and the disproportionate teaching time given to gender medicine compared with conditions such as menopause, yet felt unable to speak openly. She discusses the Cass Review’s findings on suicide claims, her conversation with a young detransitioner, the exploratory approach described by Dr Az Hakeem in Detrans, and the culture of fear that leaves junior doctors especially vulnerable. Later she attended Let Women Speak events, finding connection and a sense of support among women who could speak freely.
Throughout, she emphasises the need for open debate in medicine, the importance of language that reflects biological reality for women’s health, and the protective duty doctors have toward patients.
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Annie Kenneysaurus has spent years in higher-education professional services, including widening participation and, later, executive responsibility for EDI. She describes a shift from evidence-based work on underrepresented groups to posters telling staff not to question who was in a toilet, Stonewall membership, and the 'Genderbread Person'. Starting in a senior role around late 2019, she took one university out of Stonewall by 2021, framing the decision as a subscription choice against Advance HE, and later shared Diversity Champion documents with people pursuing FOIs after Stonewall wrote urging organisations to avoid answering.
The conversation covers the personal cost: a gay colleague who dropped her, a husband who prefers not to know, and a close friend who announced that a young daughter was now a boy and then cut contact. It also covers how she has used the job itself: rewriting policy, stopping post Supreme Court judgment “pity sessions,” challenging training that called misgendering illegal, and arguing that separate trans policies exist because Stonewall asked for them, not because the Equality Act requires them. She links capture to league tables, Athena Swan’s move from women in STEM to “people who identify as women,” Advance HE templates, and senior people who knew a policy was unlawful and did nothing.
She is blunt about safeguarding, single-sex workplace facilities, and health-and-safety liability for governors. She is also hopeful: financial pressure will remove roles that depend on the ideology, and grassroots women’s groups have already changed the law.Annie Kenneysaurus on X https://x.com/lennysperson
Women of Wessex on X https://x.com/WomenOfWessex
 
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Yvonne is a counsellor and psychosexual therapist in private practice in Scotland. She treats individuals and couples with sexual and intimacy difficulties; erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, vaginismus, loss of desire, compulsive sexual behaviour - work she finds rewarding because these conditions are often curable. She has also worked with young men with porn-induced erectile dysfunction, couples shattered by a hidden sex life, and partners affected by cross-dressing. She was already seeing what she later recognised as trans widows.In January 2021 she attended the online conference Do Not Adjust Your Set, chaired by Dr David Bell. Heather Brunskell-Evans described an affirmation model designed by identity politics and trans activists, not clinicians: therapists were to treat a girl as if she were already a boy. “This isn’t clinical, it’s not researched and it’s not evidence based. So I have to say this was shocking to me.” That day she peaked.What followed was a new lens on her profession: NHS training she later saw as a push to get clinicians on board; a 19-year-old detransitioner who booked three times, didn’t turn up and then wrote that she did not trust therapists; group supervision that met the subject with silence; partners required to bury the person they loved and accept an “authentic self”; older men’s private fetish becoming public; professional bodies supporting unevidenced affirmation; and rape-crisis practice that denied women a male-free environment. She has never said “trans women are women.” She uses the name a client gives. She wants to work more with detransitioners and trans widows, and to peak others teetering on the fence.Do Not Adjust Your Set: Sex, Gender and Public Policy.https://www.youtube.com/@dnaysconference5590Dutch Protocol​​https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2121238Behind the Looking Glass - Vaishnavi Sundarhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frffv2sB8zE&t=3994sMridhul Whadwahttps://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/damning-judgment-wake-up-call-for-womens-sector/Exulansichttps://exulansic.substack.com/
Warrior Teacherhttps://edijester.substack.com/
MJ Murphyhttps://x.com/hothingsgirlsay
WPATH fileshttps://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files
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In this Unsilenced story, forensic artist Chris Rynn talks about the decade spent enhancing images and videos for police investigations into child sexual abuse. Beginning in 2007, he developed techniques that helped identify offenders from hand and body details, working on around 100 cases. One of the earliest and most widely publicised was the 2009 LGBT Youth Scotland case involving a ring of eight men and an 18-month-old child.Chris describes how the work, which no one else was doing, gradually destroyed his health. Night terrors, repeated vomiting that caused a hiatus hernia, a severe spinal injury sustained while working on a case, and flashbacks triggered by the sound of children playing left him with a formal diagnosis of severe PTSD. His employer provided no ongoing monitoring or counselling. He was eventually signed off and later dismissed.The impact has been permanent. He can no longer be around children, including those of friends and family. Plans to foster were abandoned. The damage has extended to his wife and their shared future. Chris’s account shows that the harm of child sexual abuse reaches far beyond the primary victims - it scars the families of those who investigate it and the professionals who try to bring offenders to justice. His story is included because of the direct link to the LGBT Youth Scotland case and the wider safeguarding questions it continues to raise.Chris on Xhttps://x.com/dr_rynnChris on LinkedIn​​https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-christopher-rynn-43984314Chris facial reconstruction projects:https://www.instagram.com/chris_rynnCrowd funder for Punin2 Facial Reconstruction Projecthttps://ko-fi.com/punin2
 
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Kelly Oliver Dougall is a counsellor and care-business owner from the North East of England. A teenage parent who built her own companies after years in the voluntary sector, she was focused on keeping her new domiciliary care service afloat when lockdown arrived in 2020. What began as simple questions about the rules quickly brought name-calling, staff reports to the CQC, and the stress of vaccine mandates that clashed with the fundamental right to refuse treatment.Those experiences of institutional pressure opened her eyes. At a Let Women Speak event in Newcastle she heard women describe the cotton ceiling, the erasure of lesbian spaces and the medicalisation of distressed girls. She peaked. Further research, attendance at more events and the WPATH files deepened her understanding. When Party of Women sought candidates she stepped forward, campaigning in a snap election while still running her business.The cost was real: social pushback, professional complaints, a suspension by her counselling body (later overturned with help from the Free Speech Union) and an ongoing fight for her own data. Through it all she has built a specialised counselling practice for trans widows and women whose families have been caught in gender ideology — women experiencing ambiguous loss, DARVO and multi-directional abuse with almost nowhere safe to turn.Kelly’s story is one of ordinary resilience: a woman who refused to stay silent, who turned personal cost into practical support for others, and who continues to insist that women must be allowed to speak the truth.Kelly’s counselling website:https://kellyoliverdougall.co.ukKelly on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@Kelly.OliverDougall
Kelly on X:https://x.com/KODPOWKelly on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellyoliverdougall
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In this story from the Unsilenced Project, Brooke shares her personal journey from a “nice cult” upbringing in America to becoming a banner-maker for women’s rights in Scotland.Brooke describes how, during COVID, she began noticing what she saw as troubling developments around children’s safeguarding and women’s single-sex spaces. She explains why these issues felt deeply personal - recounting her own difficult experience of puberty and her long-standing instinct to protect children.She speaks openly about her initial resistance to being labelled a “TERF,” her trans friends, and the gradual shift in her thinking. Brooke then shares the story of how she began creating banners for protests and groups like the Scottish Feminist Network - turning simple felt letters and fabric into visible, creative acts of resistance.She reflects on the emotional weight of learning about safeguarding failures and the inspiring women she has met who are working to protect the rights of women, children and gay people. Brooke ends with quiet determination, explaining why she chooses to focus on what she can do: stitching banners and connecting with others who refuse to stay silent.
GRR Bill Scotlandhttps://www.holyrood.com/inside-politics/view,time-for-selfreflection-how-public-bodies-got-into-a-mess-over-sex-and-gender
Deep Green Resistance labelled TERFshttps://derrickjensen.org/2013/06/deep-green-resistance-interview-rachel-ivey/James Rennie of LGBT Youth Scotland & the Hogmanay imagehttps://www.scotsman.com/news/horror-upon-horror-that-unfolded-in-worst-ever-abuse-trial-2443859Marion Miller arrested for a tweethttps://lilymaynard.com/the-curious-case-of-marion-millar/
 
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Women built vital single-sex services like Rape Crisis centres from nothing - with no money, little support, and in the face of a society that offered survivors almost no help. They created protective spaces because they knew exactly what was needed. Those hard-won provisions were wrecked once trans ideology appeared and dismantled crucial single-sex services with no thought to the effect on women.This is a story repeating itself across women’s single-sex spaces and services - Rape Crisis Centres, Domestic Violence shelters, prisons and more - that were once acknowledged as important for safety and recovery. Trans ideology meant safeguarding was thrown aside. Rather than working to create a third space for trans people, women’s mental and physical wellbeing was disregarded and spaces were seen as fair game.In this episode of the Unsilenced Project, Rosemary Whyte shares how she co-founded Glasgow’s first Rape Crisis centre in the late 1970s exactly on that protective model. Motivated by horrific rape cases in 1974-75, she and two others started with nothing more than a living-room meeting in spring 1977 after spotting a Spare Rib advert. They built the group through word of mouth and challenged victim-blaming myths while operating in an era when married women had no financial independence and marital rape remained legal until 1989.From the very beginning they made the centre women-only because, as Rosemary explains, “if women were traumatised, seeing the embodiment of their attacker could re-traumatise them.” The transcript records that this clear protective principle was not questioned until Sandy Brindley was in Rape Crisis Scotland. Rosemary reflects on the practical support they provided, the emotional demands on volunteers, confidentiality, and leaving after three years knowing the collective would carry the work forward.This is the story of what women achieved when they put survivors first - and why that foundation still matters.Edinburgh Rape Crisis Employment Tribunalhttps://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/damning-judgment-wake-up-call-for-womens-sector/Philip / Pips Buncehttps://www.dailymail.com/news/article-6197705/City-workers-hit-gender-fluid-banker-works-days-Philip-Pippa.html
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