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I've just received this post from SEEN in publishing and they've said it's fine to share. There's a link to the report in the text.
Through the Looking Glass, a report by SEEN in Publishing, Transgender Trend and Biology in Medicine, will be formally presented in a House of Lords committee room at the invitation of Baroness Jenkins at 4:30pm today.
This report describes how editors and authors in children’s publishing have, for over a decade, promoted both the idea that children can be born in the wrong body and surgical interventions to fix this. A flood of books aimed at children, some of them in the 0-5 range, flout statutory safeguarding guidance. Some of them contain illustrations of trans-identifying women with mastectomy scars, or gay men in leather fetish gear. The report suggests that publishers’ rush to create these kinds of books, which often substitute trite moralizing for good storytelling, may explain the sharp drop in children reading for pleasure.
In 2024, the Cass Review found no evidence in favour of gender affirming ‘care’ for gender dysphoric young people. As Through the Looking Glass argues, publishers continue to ignore Cass’s warning that even social transition is not a neutral act and pushes children toward a medical pathway. They have contributed to the dizzying 4,000% increase in girls experiencing Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria that Hannah Barnes and Lisa Littman have previously reported on.
As Dr Clea Thompson, D.Clin. Psych, M.A., states in the report:
Adults who present inaccurate information about children’s development through literature cause confusion, anxiety and doubt about how children understand themselves and their relationships in the world…. Children’s literature has been co-opted by lobbyists to serve an activist agenda, and is now a contributing factor in the social transitioning of children.
Carnegie Medalist and acclaimed children’s author Anne Fine OBE FRSL says of this report:
Would it be possible to put together a more damning indictment of the world of children’s publishing than we have here? I doubt it. It is shameful. Shameful. Publishers will rush to climb on any bandwagon. But this one? Really?
This dismal betrayal of young readers. This unthinking capitulation to a biologically unfounded ideology whose false and troubling messages have damaged so many families. Over the last decade, publishers, booksellers, librarians and a bevy of joyless would-be authors became a major conduit for trans-activist propaganda and harmful lies, while others (whose books sold a good deal better) were bullied into silence, or out of their careers, by positively terrifying campaigns of cancellation and spite.
…[J]ust as the children’s publishing industry appears to have been the first captured, it is still almost the last redoubt of this dangerous idiocy. Everyone should read this report.
For far too long, children’s publishers and authors have ignored the safeguarding dangers of promoting trans ideology to young children and teens. A course correction is long overdue. We hope that this report will give readers pause for thought.
Key points from the report
- Ignoring basic biology and established and robust theories of child psychological development, a large number of recently published children’s books promote social transition, double mastectomies, and the concept of children being born in the wrong bodies.
- By publishing, promoting, and purchasing age-inappropriate and scientifically inaccurate books written by trans activists, children’s publishers and children’s librarians are failing to adhere to statutory KCSIE and RHSE guidelines and eroding child safeguarding boundaries.
- Books that promote acceptance, comfort, and care for the body a child is born in are rare if not entirely absent from catalogs and shelves. Their authors are subject to mobbing and denunciation by trans activists.
- Children’s reading for pleasure is in sharp decline.
You can read the report now at
Transgender Trend.
SEEN in Publishing thanks report authors Dr Alice Hodkinson, Stephanie Davies-Arai, Shelley Charlesworth, Gillian Philip, Sibyl Ruth, Dr. Clea Thompson, an anonymous GP, an anonymous children’s author, the artist who contributed the illustration, the anonymous organizer of this project, and Julia Williams and Lily for editing and graphics.
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