Julie Bindel at Unherd:

In 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then rape their victims before pimping them to multiple men in exchange for alcohol, cigarettes and food.

…

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national average of children in care in Blackpool.

That’s bad enough, but then there’s a plot twist.

But there is one thing I didn’t know about Blackpool, which I learned from listening to Inside the Gender Clinic, a podcast  about the much maligned Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. The  majority of referrals to the clinic are not, as one might assume, from the South, or from Brighton, but from Blackpool. This is surely the last place you’d expect to see so many trans-identified children. After all, the voices we so often hear on this issue in the media tend to belong to upper middle-class kids raised in liberal families.

But transing would be a refuge from abuse, wouldn’t it…at a horrendous price.

Claire*, who grew up in Blackpool, is working for a charity that supports female victims of male violence. She tells me that the links between the rise in young females being referred to gender identity clinics and the realities of growing up in places like Blackpool are obvious. She cites high levels of poverty and the normalisation of the exploitation of women and girls in the sex trade.

As a child, Claire, who was raised in Blackpool, was subject to men’s violence and consequently wanted to “opt out of girlhood”. She says: “The option to be removed from the harms of men would be appealing to most survivors. I am furious that we are allowing girls who need care and support to go down irreversible paths.”

Cheaper, easier, quicker – just cut their tits off.

Blackpool seems to offer a clear example of how vulnerable, damaged children are being drawn to gender ideology because it offers a “one stop shop” solution to the pain of living as a female in a hellish world of abuse. “These girls have been horrifically betrayed,” says Norma. “Why are we sending them for irreversible, damaging treatment, when what they need is protection from sexual violation and abuse?”

Because cheaper, easier, quicker, plus they’re just girls?