One journalist's obsession with Trans teenaged horror stories (told by mom and dad)

Hey Tom, you ok?

Tom Blackwell, a journalist at the National Post published a story last week about parents who are mad that their childrens’ schools aren’t automatically outing Trans children to their parents. Called, “How Canadian schools aid students’ gender transition without family consent,” the article insinuates that schools are secretly making children Trans and parents are being left in the dark.

The way Tom has written it, it sounds like a guidance counsellor could book an appointment for a child at a gender clinic and the child could … just go and make all the medical decisions without a parent’s involvement, as if an 11-year-old is allowed to make these kinds of decisions alone.

Tom seems to have a particular interest in writing horror stories about Trans children. As a reporter for the National Post, he has written maybe five article about Trans issues and all are about transitioning children and teens. All employ the same frame, rely on the same bigoted tropes and many use the same sources.

An August 17, 2022 piece is titled, “‘Slow down’ on Trans teenagers, expert says,” (Slow down? Like — don’t hit them with your car? What?) As the only link I can find is from Pressreader, I can only see the first five paragraphs, none of which talk to an actual Trans teenager.

Then, there’s this from December 4, 2021: “Canada too quick to treat gender dysphoria in minors with hormones, surgery: critics.” Like the article he published last week, Tom leads the article featuring someone’s mom who is sad that their kid is transitioning. He calls her Mary. The article claims, “Within months, the teenager had also had a double mastectomy,” something that, if true, points to an incredible wormhole in the healthcare system where someone managed to actually get care in lightening speed.

I digress.

A year earlier in December 2020, Tom wrote an article with this headline: “Canada's teen transgender treatment boom: Life-saving services or dangerous experimentation?”

Tom’s latest piece and the piece he published in 2020 both feature the same source with her very same headshot (who is also a rare supportive voice in each piece).

Left -- article from last week, Right -- article from 2021.

He also recycles other sources, including anti-Trans sources like Mother Mary, who appears in both the Dec. 2020 article and the Dec. 2021 article.

Mel Woods wrote a thorough takedown of Canadian media’s transphobia problem, which you should read. While they don’t mention Blackwell, he falls into many tropes that Woods describes here. It’s better than what you are currently reading, so if you need to abandon this page and read it now, I encourage you to do so.

But let’s go back to Tom specifically, and the most recent piece. Published in January (did he miss his annual “it’s December, let's do Transphobia” reminder?), it argues that parents should be informed by the school when their children are experimenting with new pronouns.

His piece is full of head scratchers like this: “An Ottawa woman took a local school to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal after her daughter’s Grade 1 teacher suggested there was no difference between boys and girls during a lesson on gender fluidity. The tribunal ruled in the school’s favour.” (Sorry, are we supposed to think that there is a legally actionable outcome when a teachers tells children that “boys and girls are the same” ??)

And this: “The way that I see it, the schools are triangulating the family — they’re becoming a wedge between the child and parent,” said another unnamed mom who thinks that wedges and triangulation are the same thing (lady — triangulating does not mean what you think it means).

Headscratchers aside, the reporting is both factually incorrect and dangerous. Rather than interrogating why some children (and here, we are talking about children in Grade 6) are not comfortable coming out to their parents, he insinuates that parents have a right to be told these things about their children, even when a child doesn’t feel safe enough to tell them.

Most children rely on supportive parents to go through any gender-related exploration. When the parent and child have a solid relationship, there is a foundation on which to build further, whether a child seeks medical interventions or not, whether a child’s gender identify shifts and changes, or stays stable. Parents play a key role in this process, obviously, as the ultimate say over medical interventions while the children are still minors.

But what about the children who the article focuses on; the ones who are afraid to come out to their parents? The ones who are beaten if they walk around in mummy’s shoes, or are caught trying on lipstick. The ones who bawl in the chair of the salon as their hair is being cut off, or not cut short enough? Or the ones who cry every morning because they want to wear some item of clothes to school, but that their parents will spank them if they did? Or the children who have finally found a teacher who accepts them for who they are, and that the child knows that their parents hate their teacher and are trying to get them into another class? Or the child who is raised to fear a raised fist for any or no reason at all?

What about them, Tom?

Transitioning is not an easy process. In Quebec at least, it requires meetings with social workers, psychiatrists, a meeting of a panel of other psychiatrists to determine if your child’s case is serious enough to recommend medical interventions. It requires a family doctor to be on-side. It often requires travel, as there are very few gender clinics in the province. All of this, while parents and children are navigating the unchartered waters of a child growing up and a healthcare system where it can take two years or more to see a psychiatrist or get a family doctor.

None of this is possible by school intervention alone, not by a long shot. It doesn’t just take a supportive parent; it takes an activist parent who can navigate bureaucracy, keep appointments, knock on doors and have time off for meetings.

Tom’s articles are dangerous because they mask the fact that many children are not safe coming out to their parents. Literally — they face violence if they were to try. And Tom’s article argues that a last vestige of safety for these kids — school — should be taken away from the children who use their pronouns outside of the home. He has chosen to highlight the opinions of angry, hostile, scared, confused, unconvinced, controlling parents — those poor, poor parents — who for some reason that goes uninterrogated in his articles, have children who do not feel safe confiding in them or who don’t understand their childrens’ struggles.

There is zero good faith in these articles. No generosity extended to kids who experiment (like who cares if a kid cycles through pronouns as they grow into themselves?) or to a flawed system that has been set up to help children the best that it can. The article ignores the voices of Trans kids completely and holds up parents who come across as unthinking pawns in a Trans panic that has been sweeping the Anglosphere for a few years now. If Tom is so interested in writing about the horror stories of teen transition, we have to ask: why? If these stories represent a small minority of experiences, why do they account for 100% of his Trans-related reporting?

The final thing I’ll say about this is that Tom has also done the very predictable thing of playing the victim after he was criticized for writing total shit.

At the time of writing this, Tom’s tweet, the one where he posts this article, was responded to 27 times and quote-tweeted 13 times. Thirty-three replies/quotes are negative (they challenge his facts, his frame and the impact of the article), but they don’t call him names. He is told to ‘fuck off’ or ‘fuck you’ four times. One person told Tom to suck his colon and maybe five replies are supportive, like one that argues that Transness needs to be stomped out of children.

Now, I get it. For a white man, getting 27 replies on Twitter feels like the end of the world. But rather than defending his shitty journalism (especially his decision to not actually speak to Trans children for interviews), he instead started crying.

He tweeted (sorry it’s copy and pasted, he didn’t actually link these tweets so I’d have to link them individually, this is easier):

“Why do Canadian media avoid this issue? Some responses to a Tweet of my balanced, measured story on schools' role in gender transition: "Fuck you" ... "You rancid hack" ... "utter lying nonsense" ... "you're human garbage" ... "suck the shit directly out of my asshole." 1/2

2/2 The point isn’t that parents are necessarily right to complain about this. Nor is it anti-trans. The issue is that this is significant public policy. Call me naïve, but I think balanced media scrutiny should be a given, not a cause for name calling.

Write about certain topics, and you're reminded that left-wing trolls can be as ugly and abusive as their right-wing counterparts. (I encounter both!) One noteworthy overlap between the ideological polar opposites of Twitter: a propensity to insult their target's looks. Curious.”

Yes, Tom. It’s curious. It’s super curious why you would receive blowback, fair and legitimate criticism, and a few fuck offs for writing a hit piece on literal children. But the number of people insulting him (I actually didn’t see a single tweet calling him ugly but let’s be generous towards him and assume that three people made fun of his forehead or something) are outnumbered five-fold by people demanding to know why he’s unfairly targeting Trans children in a national newspaper. Funny how he doesn’t respond to that. Must be all that ugliness.

I guess to Tom, the second a child identifies as Trans, they are reduced to “significant public policy,” humanity be damned.

Update 1: a reader sent me another Tom special, which is a story about a teacher who is mad that a children’s book had this exchange in it: “He [the character] voices excitement about starting on testosterone and when the physician says it would mean he likely wouldn’t be able to have children, he says, “It’s cool.”

The teacher was mad that “it’s cool” sounded like a philosophical comment on the ease of gender transition and what if the person some day wanted to have children!!?!?!??! and somehow the teacher missed the fact that “it’s cool” is also a way to say “it’s alright” or “ok” and that even Trans men can have babies and why is this teacher even concerned about the future babies that a CHARACTER IN A BOOK MIGHT SOMEDAY HAVE????

*editor’s note: Tom once labelled me “a blogger” in a National Post article where he cited my COVID-19 research to write about outbreaks in warehouses, despite me being a bona fide journalist. I had to get a correction. Oh also I’m the editor.